italki Review – The Good, The Bad, & The Just Alright

italki

Rating 4.5

★★★★

★

Summary

italki is the most flexible and affordable place to find a tutor for the language you’re learning. They have a huge number of teachers offering classes to students of over 100 different languages. As a learner, you’ll be able to find a tutor that best fits your learning style, schedule, and personality. Teachers are able to set their own prices and make their own schedule.

Quality 4.5

★★★★

★

You’ll find everyone from long-time professionals to brand new teachers.

Thoroughness 4.0

★★★★★

The overall platform has tons of useful features but also some room for improvement.

Value 5.0

★★★★★

Huge number of teachers, low prices, and flexible scheduling.

I Like

There are large numbers of teachers available even for less common languages.
You can find skilled teachers even at low prices.
The flexibility to schedule lessons whenever convenient. The huge number of teachers guarantees you’ll find someone to fit your schedule.
The extra features in the italki Community make it easy to ask questions, get your writing checked, and find a free language exchange partner.

I Don’t Like

Community features are only available through the app.
You may need to try several tutors before finding one that fits your learning and personality style.
It’s easy to not take classes as often as you should.

Price

The prices vary by teacher and language with some being as low as $5 and others as high as $60 per hour. Most will fall somewhere near the $10 per hour range. Right now italki is offering a $10 credit with your first purchase.

BUY 1 ITALKI LESSON GET 1 FREE

It’s very rare for me to recommend a particular resource for everyone, regardless of the language that they’re studying. Usually each language will have their own unique resources that are great specifically for students of that language.

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Unlimited Spanish Mini-Review: Learn Grammar Intuitively

Unlimited Spanish

Rating 4.2

★★★★

★

Price:

$ 0.00

Summary

On his website, Oscar, the founder of Unlimited Spanish, provides hundreds of downloadable podcasts with free, well organized transcripts. The podcasts provide an introduction to his teaching method and are separate from his four purchasable courses. Oscar avoids the traditional textbook methods of learning Spanish and helps his students learn to think in the language. His episodes include short stories with accompanying exercises for you to respond to while you listen. Although he speaks slightly slower than a natural speed, he still introduces vocabulary that would be new even to the upper-intermediate learner. If you have no background in Spanish, his 30 day course will help you learn the foundation of spoken Spanish from scratch and teach you grammar intuitively rather than through drilling exercises. He also has courses for intermediate learners to improve fluency, and a new course for those struggling with verb tenses. Many of the courses include Point of View Lessons that help make grammar more intuitive; these lessons tell the same story in different tenses or from different perspectives Judging by the quality of his podcasts, it seems like the courses would be a solid investment to improve your Spanish. Listen to a couple (or couple hundred) free episodes to see if it suits your learning style!

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Sublearning Mini-Review: There Are Better Uses For Your Time

Sublearning

Rating 1.3

★

★★★★

Price:

Free

Summary

Sublearning is a very simple website that supposedly helps you learn languages through movie subtitles. You will be presented with 1 to 6 lines of subtitles from your chosen movie, and then you can reveal the translation after thinking about the response. There are 62 source and target languages, which does make one wonder where the translations are coming from; be wary of Sublearning’s translation quality. Just to clarify, the subtitles do not seem to be sourced from the most iconic phrases from your favourite movies; rather, they seem to be random lines from the movie, sometimes as simple as “I don’t think so”. If you’re just looking to reminisce about anything that was said in movies you have seen, you can go to Sublearning to pass some time. However if you’re interested in language learning, I recommend checking out some of the many resource reviews we have on this site.

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Español Automatico Mini-Review: A Natural, Manageable Speed

Español Automatico

Rating 4.0

★★★★★

Price:

Freemium, Courses cost between $23 -$347

Summary

Español Automático supports Spanish learners to dive into real-world Spanish. Their content seems well organized and high-quality, despite some of the courses being quite an investment. They have a free podcast with purchasable transcripts in addition to some online courses. As all of the content is entirely in Spanish and at a relatively natural speed, it is most suitable for intermediate or advanced learners. Nevertheless, the hard-core beginner may benefit from it as well. The podcast covers various topics, such as grammatical nuances and tips to advance your learning. The creators might explain (in Spanish) the difference between ‘the four porqués’, or they might help you overcome your fear of making mistakes. You can get the transcripts for a small donation on Patreon, but you are encouraged to listen to their videos and podcasts without a transcript in order to increase your listening comprehension. Español Automático has a couple of courses — in particular, Piensa y Habla en Español seems quite promising. Each unit comes with a text accompanied by an audio narration, plus vocabulary explanations, challenges, and comprehension questions. Similar to Oscar’s Point of View lessons in Unlimited Spanish, the narrators in Español Automático will summarize the text in various verb tenses in order to help these tenses become more intuitive. You can test out the first unit on their website to see more about this course.

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Bluebird Languages Mini-Review: Over 160 Languages Available

Bluebird Languages

Rating 2.5

★★

★

★★★

Price:

Free, Premium subscriptions cost $13.99/mo, $144.99/year

Summary

Bluebird Languages has several types of lessons you can choose from, including a daily lesson, core vocabulary, essential verbs, creating sentences, powerful phrases, and conversation. Each topic seems to have a beginner, intermediate, and advanced lesson, although it’s not clear how advanced “advanced” is. In each lesson, an English-speaking narrator will ask you to listen to and repeat translations of various phrases. The recordings in each language seem to use native speakers’ voices, which is quite the feat considering they have lessons in over 160 languages. Bluebird Languages’ phrases don’t construct a replicable dialogue, so the phrases don’t seem to have a lot of context other than the topic at hand. Furthermore, the topics seem to be identical in all languages, so most of the phrases will not be culture-specific. They also don’t break down complicated pronunciation, but you can try to break it down yourself by slowing down the recording to 0.5x speed. Bluebird Languages seems similar to Pimsleur but appears less organized and will probably not improve your communication abilities as quickly. Nevertheless, it may be a good free alternative for beginners, and the program will probably help you develop some confidence in speaking languages that have less challenging pronunciation. The conversation and personalized lessons require a monthly membership, but there is enough free content that these add-ons may not be necessary.

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FunEasyLearn Mini-Review: Build Vocabulary The Fun Way

FunEasyLearn

Rating 2.6

★★

★

★★★

Price:

Freemium, monthly subscriptions starting at $11.99

Summary

Not only does FunEasyLearn have a slick app interface, high-quality recordings of native speakers, and a variety of activities to reinforce your learning, but it also allows you to learn from 61 mother tongues. The lessons were developed by a team of certified linguists and acting teachers; they cover reading, listening, speaking and writing. You have the choice of learning individual vocabulary or common phrases, both of which navigate between various common categories such as “Describing people”, “General Conversation”, “ and “Transport”. Unfortunately, FunEasyLearn does not seem to provide a foundation for learning more challenging scripts, such as Chinese or Thai; luckily they have a special feature where you can choose to omit the writing aspect and see transliterations; this will allow you to focus on speaking and listening. Ultimately, FunEasyLearn is a fun and easy way to develop some basic vocabulary, but it is probably not the most effective resource for hard-core language learners; you will need to use another resource if you want to learn more than basic vocabulary words.

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Bite Size Languages Mini-Review: Good for Beginners

Bite Size Languages

Rating 3.8

★★★

★

★★

Price:

$99 per course

Summary

Bite size language was developed by the creator of the Actual Fluency Podcast. Each of the 5 languages consists of 100 lessons for beginners to develop their listening comprehension and pronunciation. You will learn grammar within the context of short dialogues and acquire relevant every-day vocabulary. Each lesson seems doable within a 15-25 minute study session; they contain lesson notes, transcripts, translations, vocabulary, and a grammar section. It seems like the dialogues speed up slightly as you advance through the lessons, but the final lessons do not reach a natural speed. This is understandable, however, as the program is aimed at beginners who have little or no exposure to the language (you can listen to some sound clips from various lessons here). You may be expected to repeat every lesson a few dozen times to get the most out of the course. If you are studying Russian, the creator emphasizes that you don’t need to learn the Russian alphabet because the dialogues are the core of the lessons. But, all of the accompanying materials, including transcripts of the dialogues, are written in Russian.

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Lingua Boost Mini-Review: Use Pimsleur Instead

Lingua Boost

Rating 2.2

★★

★

★★★

Price:

1 level costs $19.90, two levels cost $33.90

Summary

Lingua Boost’s website sells downloadable volumes of phrasebook-like lessons that teach everyday phrases in context. The lessons are about 10 minutes long; they are narrated by native speakers and focus on vocabulary within a specific topic. Although each lesson seems to contain something that resembles a dialogue, every phrase is spoken by the same person. Additionally, many of the lessons initially appear to be dialogues, but end up as a list of sentences. For example, the first line of a lesson might be, “what do you like to do?” followed by a series of statements such as “I like to read books,” or “I like to go swimming.” Furthermore, for languages that have more difficult pronunciation, such as Russian and Hindi, the lessons do not break down pronunciation. In Pimsleur, for example, they use an excellent technique of working backwards with each syllable in a word. In Lingua Boost, it seems that you are expected to just listen and gradually catch on, even from the absolute beginner level. Finally, each volume must be purchased separately, but you can test out the first 5 lessons for free on their website. If you’re looking for a similar course that breaks down pronunciation, has interactive activities and helps you learn full dialogues in context, check out Pimsleur’s subscription plan.

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LingoHut Mini-Review: Good Intentions, So-So Follow Through

lingohut

Rating 2.0

★★★★★

Price:

Free

Summary

Kendal and Philipp, the creators of the LingoHut, are passionate about teaching languages. Their website supposedly helps A1 and A2 language learners develop their confidence in listening and pronunciation. All audio clips were recorded by native speakers so that beginners can get accustomed to natural pronunciation, and each lesson has a series of matching games for listening comprehension and reading. Unfortunately, the creators’ genuine intention to support beginners doesn’t seem to translate into their lessons. The lessons are essentially a series of phrases that are not adapted to each language’s culture; each of the 50 languages use the exact same set of sentences and lesson formats. This means that you will learn how to say ‘dumpling’ both in Chinese and Italian. There is also no section to learn the script of languages such as Korean, Hindi, or Arabic, nor are there transliterations to help beginners sound out the pronunciation. Furthermore, some sentences switch between formal and informal language without explanation, which would not be intuitive for an A1 learner. If you want a free resource to listen to native speakers’ pronunciation of hundreds of common phrases, LingoHut is definitely a free option. However, there are other resources that can help you learn languages more effectively.

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Lirica Mini-Review: Grammar and Vocabulary Through Songs

Lirica

Rating 4.2

★★★★

★

Price:

Free trial, $8.49/mo, $19.99/quarter, $24.99/year

Summary

Lirica is a paid app that focuses on listening comprehension, vocabulary, and grammar through songs in Spanish, German, and English. It also elaborates on important common phrases, explains colloquialisms, and provides interesting facts about the target language. Each song is assigned either Beginner 1, Beginner 2, or Intermediate, in addition to a specific learning goal, such as “Making affirmative sentences negative” or “expressing misunderstanding”. It’s surprisingly effective at supporting comprehension and memorization of various songs. Lirica continually expands its song library, with new songs added weekly, so a yearly subscription may be worth your time. Also, by purchasing the app you continue to support the artists, as Lirica has entered licensing agreements with each label. Check out their 7 day free trial! If you are looking for a free version that does not provide any vocabulary or grammar explanations, check out Lyrics Training.

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