They removed the instant lesson today. What do you guys think about it? They replaced it with short notice bookings.

I am a native speaker of a small creole language that has since grown in demand since the country in which it is spoken in (Guyana) is on track to become one of the wealthiest nations in the world (per capita) due to new oil reserves. How do I request that Italki add my language to its platform so that I can connect with learners? Is there a formal way to go about this?

Thank you in advance.

I’m based in Germany and want to create a Payoneer account to receive payments from italki for online German tutoring on Italki.
I registered my self-employed tutoring activity with the German tax office using the „Fragebogen zur steuerlichen Erfassung“ and received a tax number. However, I haven’t registered a trade or established a separate company. I work under my own name.
During Payoneer registration, should I select “Registered business” or “Unregistered business”?
Has anyone in Germany been in a similar situation?
Thanks!

I'm confused as to why this spanish tutor has their 30 min trial lesson priced at $13 while her 60 min structured lesson is $11. and her 45min structured lesson is $18? is this common?

I really want to book a lesson but I'd rather book a 60 min lesson rather than 30min. should I j

give this tutor a chance or keeping looking? :(

Basically I worked consistently with a Spanish tutor for about a year, but I ended up taking a break from learning this past year while I traveled and took on other hobbies.

I’m now interested in starting and being consistent again but I’m a little nervous and truthfully embarrassed because I haven’t made much progress from my time away. I’m worried she’d be disappointed and less interested because I didn’t keep up and may have forgot some things.

For tutors, how do you genuinely feel in these situations? Do you care if they made no progress or are just happy they’re interested in learning again?

Last time we talked she said listening I’m a B1 but speaking I’m A1/A2 because I couldn’t have fluent conversations about real life stuff and I still can’t and am stronger understanding vs speaking. So I think I’m a bit insecure about that.

Hola: ¿qué pasa con las plazas docentes de español y por qué es tan difícil serlo? Teniendo los requisitos ok

One thing I'd love to add to italki is dynamic pricing. I'm really busy on Sundays and wish I could make booking Sunday classes more expensive, say by 30%. Fridays are weirdly dead, I'm happily take a 10% pay cut to encourage more students to move! It would be similiar to flights or hotels in that way. Do you think it's viable?

Hi everyone! I hope I’m not boring you, but I’m really looking for some help figuring out how to get my italki profile off the ground. I apologize in advance for all the details I'm going to share, but I want to make sure I give you as much information as possible.

I’m a Community Tutor teaching Italian. So far, I have three regular students, but unfortunately, they all have demanding jobs and can only make time for lessons once or twice a month at most. They’re very happy with my lessons and have left me some lovely and specific reviews.

I also had one student who booked a package of five lessons and took them while on vacation from work, and another student who didn’t continue after the first lesson.

My rates are around $20 per hour, and I teach Italian.

Until recently, I only offered a conversation course, but I’ve now added a grammar-through-conversation course and another one based on authentic Italian-language videos.

I haven’t had any new students book lessons since this summer, and I can’t figure out what I might be doing wrong.

I have over 15 years of experience teaching Italian, and I also have private students who have been taking lessons with me for years. Some of them have even completed their learning journey with me. So I know that I can help students make progress, and I don't think the problem necessarily lies in the quality of my teaching (or at leas I hope!). However, I'm struggling to understand what I might doing wrong on Italki. Why am I not getting any new bookings...

I’ve also been thinking about creating podcasts for italki to help attract potential students.

Does anyone have any advice or suggestions? I’d really appreciate hearing about your experiences and what has worked for you. Thanks in advance!

After learning mostly from books, I'd rate myself A2 in my target language for speaking and something like B1/B2 for reading. Decent vocabulary and understanding of grammar; OK listening comprehension; absolutely crap speaking skills. I recently started iTalki and when teachers judge my skills they seem to be all over the place. (And no wonder really. I can sound pretty competent when reading some text out loud, but don't ask me to narrate what I did last weekend.) Which of these teachers would you keep working with if you were in my position?

• Teacher A treats me like an A1/A2 student. Practices things with me like giving directions to the bus stop, sentence by sentence.
• Teacher B engages me in conversation, sometimes explains very basic grammar if he hears me repeatedly making a mistake, but also gives me B2/C1 materials as homework.
• Teacher C offers a read & discuss class. Chooses newspaper articles (unedited) which we read and discuss.
• Teacher D tries to teach me individual words through conversation. ("What do you call this object?")

I'm inclined to keep working with B and C, as I learn a lot from them (and I feel like they understand my reading/speaking disparities the best), but am wondering if I should keep working on the low-level stuff with A and/or D as well. Clearly I'm still making some pretty basic mistakes. Should I keep working on those with A and D or will this automatically also come when working with B and C?

Have woke up today to a booking from a new student made overnight 12 hours 5 minutes ahead of the booking.

Due to illness I cant make it and will be at doctor at this time.

However I can only cancel the lesson 24 hours out.

Have messaged but so far no response.

How do I manage this without it impacting my rating?

(Context - I have my booking confirmation set to maximum of 12 hours but this is a mismatch against minimum 24 hour cancellation time for tutors)

Most of my students make good progress, but a few of them don't. Sometimes they forget things we have repeated a lot of times already.

In that case, what do you guys do ? Do you just repeat again ? That's what I'm doing for now, but I wonder if they might be bored.

Thank you !

I’m so grateful to have been approved as a tutor, can’t wait for this new journey in my life! 😇 glory to God 🙏🏽

Final rankings were released today for the iTalki 2026 Learning Challenge. I am curious to know how everyone finished, mostly to see if we can get a gauge of how many active learners there are on the platform, and how many hours you would have to commit to in order to break top 1,000, top 500, etc.

I completed 6 hour-long lessons during the challenge, which works out to one per week (challenge ran September 1 - October 15). My final ranking after 6 hours of instruction was #2,621.

I was kind of surprised I was that high. I was under the impression iTalki was one of the most used language tutoring platforms. However my ranking indicates that only a couple thousand people are doing weekly lessons…? That seems low to me.

Perhaps though people are doing shorter weekly lessons, so their total time was lower despite keeping a weekly routine. I also thought it was too bad group lessons didn’t count towards the ranking, I thought they should at least count for 1/2 time or something.

So how did you all do? I’m just asking for curiosity, not trying to make this competitive. But I want to know if anyone took weekly half-hour lessons, what was their ranking? Or if anyone was in the top 1000, how many hours did you complete?

And congratulations to anyone who participated! I think we should all be proud of any amount of time we put in to improve our language skills!

I am a potentially starting to tutor on iTalki very soon. I would like to know the preferences of students and the following areas:

1. Can you rank which language you would like to learn between French Arabic and English if you had to
2. ⁠ is there something specific or a general thing you might want to see in the tutor's profile in order to drawn to have a class with them
3. ⁠ what do you think is a fair rate per hour for each of the languages mentioned above?

Thank you all for your time

Ich bin selbst Lehrkraft und muss spontan eine Lektion die jetzt wäre verschieben. Wie mache ich das? Ich sehe keine Option. Wie wirkt sich das auf meine Statistiken aus? Wirkt es sich nur für die nächsten 3 Monate aus?

Keen to know if most of you have jobs besides Italki, and if so, what do you do?

I don't know if I should laugh, cringe or whatever... but it is what it is, I guess. :/

Serious question: do you think he was being serious or was he just a pervert? I'm seriously confused.

Am I doing something wrong, or maybe I've missed something? I think I've set my price as low as it will go ($20/hr?), I have a pretty detailed profile, I was doing this on Amazing Talker successfully but felt iTalki would be better. But I've had an active profile for 7 days now with no inquiries and only 1 profile visit.

iTalki has a webpage that shows if a language is open for application, i.e. you can apply to teach on iTalki. The webpage is updated weekly: https://support.italki.com/hc/en-us/articles/115001499873-Is-my-language-open-for-application

Most popular languages like English, Spanish, French, Chinese, Russian, Japanese, Korean, are often closed. But there is an exception: German. Every time I look at the list, which updates every week, German is always open. I think I never saw it closed, did you? Why is that?

Wondering if it’s just purely conversation?
I want some kind of structure
Is anyone on here using lessons from other sites?

I would say this happens at least 1 out of every 4 classes now. It is super disruptive to my schedule, e.g. rushing home to make a class and then two minutes before class starts I get some excuse like "family problem" or "sore throat" etc... Does iTalki do nothing about this?