![]() ![]() And there is nothing like helping others to boost your own motivation. There are many free, peer-to-peer features, which aim to get members helping each other. The creators have tried hard to create a dynamic community, as well as a market for teachers. Community learningīeing part of iTalki is about more than just lessons. Some of my best iTalki tutors of all have been community tutors. Often the distinction is not one of teaching quality, but simply a case of hard qualifications. Good community tutors can be just as good as professional tutors, but often charge significantly less. ITalki’s tiering system of professional / community tutors makes for more affordable lessons, too. Under these conditions, students can more easily try multiple tutors to find a perfect match. Additionally, most teachers offer a trial lesson for an extremely small sum. Likewise, when searching online for independent tutors, prices can be prohibitively high.įor mainstream languages like French and Spanish, the sheer number of tutors, and resulting competition, results in some very favourable prices for lessons. One of the other ‘biggies’, VerbLing, seems quite expensive by comparison. Generally speaking, iTalki prices compare very favourably with other teacher directory / lesson sites. On iTalki, you have up to an hour or more, exclusively for you to practise. When travelling, you might go a whole day without managing to strike up much conversation beyond asking directions. That contrasts with a wide variability of experience quality when travelling to learn languages. Immersion in an iTalki lesson is also very focussed, intense and directed. Even at $20+, you’ll go a long way before it gets cheaper to travel abroad to learn and practise. You could have scores of lessons at that price before you hit the budget for a trip to Russia. Russian teachers are available from $5 (about £3.60 at the time of writing) per hour upwards. ITalki offers immersion in short, intense chunks for a much smaller outlay. Add to that the difficulties of getting visas and travel documents in many cases, and immersion abroad is simply off the cards for many. As a casual learner of Russian in the UK, I know that only too well. Cheaper than travellingĬountless online articles expound the necessity of immersion for advanced fluency. However, ‘traditional’ immersion – travelling to hear and speak a language – can be costly. ![]() So here is my reasoning on why iTalki is still an excellent use of my dosh. Ever a good home economist, I’m always trying to justify my spending. I learnt about the service some time ago from Benny Lewis’ site, and have since found out how highly addictive it is for language junkies.īut it can be an expensive business, scheduling countless lessons a month – especially if you learn several languages at once. ![]() This very popular website is a kind of language teacher directory service, where students can browse and contact hundreds of experts for one-to-one lessons on Skype. Ah, those were the days.I’ve been spending a fortune on iTalki recently. In the days when travel was more of a thing, you could even access uTalk on EasyJet to prep a bit so you could chat in a new language on your city trip. uTalk is connected to all manner of organisations, representing a wide range of communities and languages from Ladino to Manx, Southern Sami to Esperanto. Their network of partners and collaborators is vast. You can tell that community means a lot to uTalk, so we didn’t really have to explain much in terms of what we were trying to do with Sisters Only Language Summit. They’ve crossed deserts and climbed mountains to gather all this great material, and throughout have demonstrated how they value minority and endangered languages, as well as all the major languages people would like to get onto their CV. More than 1000 native speakers have been recorded in the making of the app. So when Sisters Only Language Summit was born last year, and we started considering who we wanted to partner with (especially with African language taster sessions being on the menu for the second event), uTalk was at the top of that list. It was like finding an oasis in a desert, because most language apps (ok, most people) are usually like: What is a Tigrinya? They included Tigrinya fidel script and English phonetic translations. You can record your own voice to see how it measures up to the examples given, and the visuals are memorable, colourful and clear. You can choose from different game/memory/matching options to learn the words as audio recordings from native speakers help you out. ![]()
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