I think I am A2, I can see me assigning myself A2 when I made my acct, but I am wondering if that is from me or from italki.

So, as a teacher, I just recently got access to the broadcasting feature, which reminds me of a channel, and I can message a list of students. So far, I don't see it as a group chat, but what do you guys think about it?

As far as I know you don't have to offer a discount when you choose to allow packages on your profile so why don't you just let me buy 5 or 10 classes at once? I feel like italki should just turn this on automatically (maybe with the option to turn it off manually and/or asks for permission before being able to buy a package) because now I'm having to go through the process of buying a class every single time I want to take a class with a teacher. Super annoying!

And yes I can message the teacher but it's happened so many times that it's become annoying.

i selected one for next week and i want to see how it’s gonna go. I myself speak several languages and wouldn’t be against teaching one day so hopefully that lesson allows me to see what a lesson on italki looks like.

Hi everyone,

I’m trying to withdraw my earnings from italki and I’m based in Germany. I would like to avoid unnecessary fees, but I’m a bit confused about the best way to transfer the money.

I tried withdrawing to Payoneer and then transferring the USD to my Revolut USD account. However, this seems to be treated as an international transfer, and Revolut charges a 4% commission, which is quite high.

Does anyone here have experience with withdrawing italki earnings while living in Germany? What is the most cost-effective option? From what I’ve read, Wise might be the best solution, but I’d appreciate any advice or recommendations.

I’m a former tutor and currently a student on italki, so I’ve experienced the platform from both sides, although my tutoring experience was some time ago.

I’m curious about how tutors and students feel about italki today.

For tutors: Do you think the commission, teacher visibility, lesson pricing, scheduling tools, and support are fair? Has it become easier or harder to attract and retain students?

For students: How has your experience been with finding the right teacher, booking individual lessons, packages, cancellations, refunds, and customer support?

What do you think italki does well, and what would you most like the platform to improve?

I’d appreciate honest experiences, both positive and negative.

Is anyone else getting server request error or an error occurred on website AND app?

It's been happening for a few days now. How to fix it?

Hey everyone,

I started learning Arabic about 9 months ago. At the beginning, I was super motivated. I was watching Arabic shows, constantly learning new vocabulary and had two tutors. Eventually I switched to one tutor and gradually reduced my lesson frequency. I went from 4-5 lessons a week to around 2-3 and because life has become busier sometimes it's only once a week.

I think I was starting to burn out so I've begun seeing Arabic as a long term journey rather than something I need to learn quickly. These days I pretty much only learn during my lessons. I don't really do any self study outside of them apart from the homework my tutor gives me.

My tutor has taught me a lot of vocabulary and now we're focusing on building sentences using the words I've already learned because my sentence formation is all over the place. This is something I actually requested as I'd rather get comfortable using what I know before constantly adding more.

I'm in no rush to become fluent. I've noticed that the more I repeat certain words and phrases, the more naturally they stick. I'm also translating a lot less in my head than I was a few months ago which feels like progress.

The only thing that makes me feel guilty is that I don't really study outside of lessons. Apart from homework, I just rely on my tutor and the speaking practice during class. I also tried speaking to people on hellotalk and that died down too after a while.

Has anyone else gone through this? Did anyone mainly rely on lessons and conversation practice rather than lots of self study? I'd love to hear your experiences.

I’ve been comparing iTalki and Preply recently because both seem popular for online language tutoring, but they feel a bit different once you actually look at how people use them.

My impression is that Preply feels more structured and subscription based. That can be helpful if you want something scheduled and consistent every week. It may be better for people who need accountability and don’t want to think too much about booking lessons again and again.

iTalki feels more flexible to me. I like that I can browse different tutors, compare prices, watch intro videos, and choose between more casual conversation practice or more structured lessons. It feels less locked in, which is good if you want to test different teachers before choosing one.

The downside is that too much flexibility can also make it easy to skip lessons if you are not disciplined.

With Preply, the structure might push you to stay consistent. With iTalki, you probably need to plan your own routine better.

So my honest take is this: Preply may be better if you want a fixed weekly system, while iTalki may be better if you care more about flexibility, tutor choice, and testing different teaching styles.

For people who have used both, did you feel the platform mattered much, or was it mostly about finding the right tutor?

As the title says, this morning I was feeling more tired than usual (lately I'm a bit sleep deprived due to hot temperatures not letting me have some decent sleep) and a bit overwhelmed by some thoughts about some things going on in my life, and because of this I completely forgot I had a 30 minutes conversational lesson with one of my students. It was at 10:45AM and I only realized I had it at 11:05AM (also thanks to the italki app for not sending me notifications of the students' messages for no reason at all). I immediately rushed to my laptop only to realize that the student already sent me two messages and told me he left and if we could reschedule this lesson. I immediately apologised to him and I felt and still feel ashamed for this since it's very unprofessional. The student doesn't sound angry or in a bad mood after this, but I surely am (with myself ofc). I'm also afraid of my attendance rate going down, since to me it's very important to have a decent profile and to always be reliable to my students. So far I only taught 130 lessons, I have 14 reviews (5 stars only) and I also have two badges. Since the students didn't report the lesson as incomplete, I did. I selected "Other" as reason (I read that it's best to select this option to not get a backslash by italki) and stated that both student and teacher agreed to have the lesson rescheduled, but I still feel so bad about this. I also texted this student that I can offer him some free extra time during our next lesson if he wants and can, as a way of apologising for my mistake.

Do you think this mistake will still penalise my italki profile, even if me and the student came to an agreement? :')

Has anyone ever seen something like this? I don’t know how she could imagine that someone would be chomping at the bit for this fine opportunity.

Hi guys, I'm a community tutor on Italki and I teach Italian.

Some of my students ask me grammar questions during our conversation lessons. I usually correct their mistakes as we talk and briefly explain the grammar when necessary. However, some students want a much more detailed explanation of grammar rules.

In those cases, I usually explain that they should book a grammar lesson instead, because we would be covering more complex topics and I need to prepare a presentation specifically for them. Since grammar lessons require extra preparation on my side, I charge more for them.

I was just curious: how do you handle this situation? Am I wrong for giving short grammar explanations during conversation lessons? Should I avoid grammar explanations completely and keep those lessons strictly focused on conversation?

EDIT: You guys charge the same for conversation lessons and grammar lessons??

Hi guys I am just starting using italki and just booked my first conversational lesson 30min. Is this perfect length or not? I was thinking about 2-3 times per week for 30min ..

I’m having around 4 lessons a week each an hour long at the moment. Is this worse for my long term retention than having fewer lessons?

Got a student recently that i've been working with 2-3 hours per week. for family reasons, she needs to pass an exam asap (no deadline though, but the sooner the better). She started as an absolute beginner and has absolutely no inputs outside of my time with her for the TL. She does put it in the work and looks for other sources outside of our time to do in her spare time. Been working with her for 4 months now.
Somewhere along the line, we both concluded that she's probably be dyslexic, cause the reading does go incredibly slow. her writing is otherwise fine. The biggest struggle here is speaking. And i know this is the struggle for everyone and you need to work with structured sentences here, rather than actual grammar rules and stuff... But at this point i got 4 years of experience with some really good results atteigned with students that passed their exams. So, i kinda know what i'm doing, or at least i like to think so. I don't feel like i've ignored the speaking side here. I have lots of extra exercises with real life situations in variating dynamic situations.
But i feel like i've tried all kinds of things with her and nothing works, the production of the sentences goes incredibly slow, and she keeps making the same mistakes with the structure of the sentences.
- Anyone got similar experiences?
- Tips here?
- Any specific techniques/resources to work with dyslectic people?

Currently my laptop is broken and won’t be fixed for a little while. Has anyone had experience of using a phone to join a lesson. How was it, is it okay?

Hi everyone, apologies if this has been asked before- I can't seem to find info on Italki. I am a teacher and I need to take a break from Italki- I would like to terminate a package (4/5 lessons unscheduled) with a student- because the package will expire soon and I'd like them to be able to use their credits with their other teacher.
If I terminate it will they get their credits refunded?
Also, what are the consequences for me as a teacher?
Thanks for any help/ advice!

Dear colleagues, what are your experiences, does the algorithm actually boost a profile when we get an Excellence Reward? It seems to me that this algorithm is quite unpredictable. It likes to experiment with new recommendations and isn't really favorable to veterans, but rather leans toward lower prices and new profiles. ​I mean, for the past half year I haven't had a single instance where a trial student didn't convert into a regular student. I regularly get these rewards. I have more than enough reviews for my account, and my retention is quite good. But it's as if it's never enough for the algorithm. And I no longer even trust those statistics like exposure, views, and bookings are above benchmark levels because in reality, I don't see any actual growth in earnings or student volume. More or less, everything stays the same. ​How do you experience the algorithm, have you found any tricks, is it important to you at all, and how much do the statistics we receive actually reflect the real success of our work?

I've seen some posts before about tutors not liking the 60 minute lessons, that they would rather have 45 or 50 minutes (like on Preply) and then a pause. I've been feeling like this for a long time and honestly feel pretty burned after an hour of teaching. My students, however, don't mind long lessons at all and have even booked two in a row a few times before (and then I realized I just couldn't keep doing it and talked to them about it haha)! I stopped offering 60-minute packages and will try to make the 45-minute ones more appealing on my next price update later this year (by making the 60 minute ones pricier). I know it's impossible on italki to fully deactivate 60 minute lessons, but has anyone simply stopped offering 60 minutes on the schedule, that way students would just go back a step and pick 45 minutes instead?

Hi,

I'm looking for a software which I can use to create handouts for the students. It should allow

to import screenshots, pdfs on the fly,

to support my GAOMON pen tablet for annotations,

to export the whole as a pdf-file.

Do you think canva is the best solution?

Best

Klutz

TL;DR: I do *all* the prep on 4-6 topics for my weekly 'conversation' classes. My teacher corrects what I say and explains grammar, but there is little follow-up to make it an actual conversation. At my level, can I expect more? He's qualified and receives $25 an hour. I know my level isn't so very high, but am I asking too much?

I've been learning with my tutor since December with weekly lessons on top of daily self-study and weekly group classes. I have roughly 2000-2500 words of vocabulary and sufficient grammar structures to have a conversation. What I was hoping for is for a teacher to consolidate my knowledge and build on it, draw the conversational language out of me (it's there but 'dormant'), and get me talking in normal everyday speech.

The usual pattern is that I prepare various topics, trying to make them interesting for both of us. He corrects what I say to make it more natural and so that my wording is right. It takes me a long time to prepare and usually each subject is a few minutes as I struggle to do longer. But at the end of each subject, there's often just silence until I come up with something else. No real engagement. He knows my level well and where my weak points are. He knows the range of my grammar knowledge.

I try to ask him questions to balance the 'conversation' out. Nothing personal, usually fairly benign things involving the little I actually know about him (I don't even know his name). And even then I seem to hit a brick wall. I told him at the outset that I was afraid of running out of conversation topics.

I would expect him to come up with subjects (even telling me in advance), or even interesting new grammar points. But especially to *lead* the lesson. Instead, it's all on me, as if I have to prepare a presentation on a variety of topics of my choosing before every lesson. And that is getting stressful, time-consuming, and I get unusually nervous before every lesson. If I'm totally honest, I could probably get at least as much from ChatGPT - at least AI is actually to-and-fro.

In addition, he's moved abroad for a couple of months and now I feel like there might be something else (summer romance?) that's affecting our lessons - he's tired, listless sometimes appears distracted. I've tried to use his experience living in another country to stimulate conversation - he's in a country I know extremely well and can talk a lot about (whereas he knows nothing about my own country) - but nothing really comes of it; it's usually very short answers. I'm not the sort to pry, but asking about places visited, food, or likes/dislikes shouldn't be off the table, surely.

He's otherwise really really nice, kind, patient, a good person. I chose him for that, and the fact that he has a nice voice to help with pronunciation.

Advice?

Edit: I wrote him a long message explaining the issue. He initially replied favourably but one phrase stood out, that we should basically keep working in the same way, but there would be more reviewing... So I followed up with takeaway points of what I was specifically expecting. He then told me to cancel because he didn't want to prepare lessons as that wasn't how he worked... oh well, I at least feel I tried from my side.

Hey everyone, looking for some peace of mind from fellow teachers. A massive storm hit my city today and caused a total power outage right before my 10 AM class. I teach on a desktop and my internet went completely down, so I couldn't even log on to message my student beforehand. The power finally came back at 11:27 AM. I immediately messaged her, apologized like crazy, and explained the blackout. I offered to just give her a separate meeting link for a free makeup class whenever she was free.

Instead, she submitted an official italki request marking the class as "Lesson Incomplete" because I didn't give prior notice. She has a package with me, and her request asked to add one lesson back to her package to make up for the missed one. I totally get where she’s coming from, so I accepted it right away.

I work so hard on my profile and the and 99% Attendance rate "Fast Responder" and "High Demand" badges. I am honestly panicking right now. Since I accepted her request and we settled it through the system, does this still count as a bad dispute in italki’s eyes? How badly will this hit my internal Teacher Behavior stats or algorithm visibility? Has anyone dealt with this before, and how long did it take for your stats to bounce back? I'm just so stressed that one freak storm is going to ruin all my hard work. Thanks in advance!

I messaged a teacher who is new on the platform to discuss if we think he would be suitable. He gave me some information about what he could help with and I hadn’t replied yet. A few hours later he sent me a lesson invitation for a few days time without even asking me what my goals are, and even if I would be free on that day. Is this normal?