Tutors & Language Exchange Partners

Practicing your target language with native speakers is something that’s hard to beat. Interacting with native speakers provides opportunity for real-time feedback on your communication skills as well as invaluable real-world experience.

The resources we’ve compiled in this list are great for connecting with real people that could potentially help tremendously in your efforts to learn a language. The resources for finding tutors include a wide range of price points, and the apps for finding language exchange partners all offer quite a bit of functionality for free.

Online Language Tutors

italki

This is one of the most popular platforms for language tutors. There is an incredible number of tutors for all kinds of languages and at all prices. With italki, your chances of finding a tutor that matches well with you are high. Read our review.

Verbling

Verbling is similar to italki in that it’s a great place to find language tutors without a great deal of commitment. Tutors on Verbling are required to have professional teaching experience, which means you can expect a fairly high level of quality but also slightly higher prices. Read the full review here.

Preply

Preply is an online tutor platform that covers a broad range of subject areas, including languages. There are plenty of tutors available for quite a few languages, and many of them charge very low rates. 

It’s worth considering, however, that Preply doesn’t pay its tutors for trial lessons and takes larger percentage of teacher pay than other platforms. Here’s our full review.

Language Exchange Partners

Tandem

Tandem is an app for Android or iOS that connects language learners from all over the world with each other in order to practice languages. It’s got a pleasing design, is easy to use, and its basic functions are totally free to use. Read our review.

The app has a built-in translation tool to facilitate conversation, but you’ll need to pay for a subscription for access to unlimited translations. 

HelloTalk

Similar to Tandem, HelloTalk is an app that connects language learners from around the world. It’s also free to use and includes built-in language tools to help with tricky dialogue. It can be a great place to find language partners, and the only real differences between this and Tandem are aesthetics and design. Check out our full review.

Speaky

Another language exchange app! This one has many similar features to Tandem and HelloTalk, and it could be the right one for you in finding a language partner. The community may be slightly less focused on language learning than the other two, but it offers a lot for free. We’ve written a full review here.

Lingbe

If you’re mostly interested in voice calls with native speakers of your target language, lingbe could be worth a try. Instead of taking the time to browse and reach out to other language learners, you can hop on a call with a randomly selected speaker of your target language to get started chatting right away. 

The app is free to use, but you’ll need to spend “Lingos” to make calls, which you can earn by speaking to learners of your native language. Here’s our mini review.