When looking for an Italian tutor, there are two ways for you to find one, either online or in-person. There are some upsides and downsides of either way.
Italian tutor near me – pros and cons
If you work with Italian language tutors in-person, you can have more interactive lessons. However, the price is often higher.
Italian tutor online – pros and cons
Working with Italian tutor online is much more convenient, you don’t need to travel far away to have Italian lessons. Also, the price is cheaper. However, online lessons require students focused more on their study cause it’s easy to give up learning online.
How to find an Italian tutor without spending too much money?
When considering an Italian tutor, you need to take into account their certification, teaching experience, price and time compatibility. Hence, you might need to spend a lot of money and time to have many trial lessons with tutors until you find a perfect one. So, in this article, I would introduce 6 sites that you can find a perfect Italian tutor. In the meantime, I would share how to have free lessons or get a discounted rate.
Boost your Italian language learning
Aside from taking lessons with a tutor, some sites stand out for their additional features such as learning community, integrated teaching platform, and vocabulary learning system. By taking advantage of these functions, you can easily increase your Italian learning exponentially.
Recommendation for you
Find Italian tutors – Preply
Preply is the second-largest tutoring platform which means they are pretty mature as well. Established in 2012, Preply has provided its service to many teachers and students worldwide. They not only offer language tutors but also tutors teaching other subjects such as computer science, music, business. Preply is home to many tutors as well, approximately 200 tutors in Italian category. Preply doesn’t differentiate their teachers like Italki does, however, they give teachers different tags to let students identify which teachers are popular and could be trusted. Similar to Italki, you have to use Skype to have a one-to-one lesson with your tutor.
What is special about Preply?
If you’re bothered looking for a Italian tutor, you can post a request and let tutors find you. Posting a request appears on the last page when you’re browsing the teachers. You need to offer what subject you would like to learn, what requirements you have, what price you would like to pay.
Price From: $10
Payment options: Visa, Mastercard and PayPal
Flexibility of lesson plans ★★★✩✩
After your first free trial hour, you have to buy at least 5 hours. Preply offers discounts for packages of 10 and 20 hours.
User Experience ★★★✩✩
In general, Preply offers an intuitive user interface. Easy to find a teacher, easy to add hours and easy to monitor all your learning progress.
Customer Support ★★★★★
You can check the customer support at the bottom right corner. FAQs are well organized to help you have lessons with tutors. You can also find instant help by contacting online customer support. Business hours — 6 am – 11 pm on weekdays, 8 am – 6 pm on weekends.
Get free Italian lessons and discounts
Preply offers every new user free first lesson, so you can try at least one teacher without risking at wasting money. After your first trial lesson, if you’re not satisfied with the tutor, you might book another tutor’s trial lesson right away. But, if you wait for 3 weeks and do not put any tutors into your cart, you’ll get another free lesson. Usually, they offer a free lesson after 30 days a user do not book any lessons when they have remaining hours with a tutor or after 20 days a user do not purchase any hours. Though they have this kind of remarketing activities, changing tutors constantly is not helpful in learning languages at all. (And actually, the cost is on the tutor, not Preply. Preply just asks tutors to give free trial lessons which I don’t quite agree with.)
Preply also has a referral system. You can give them your referral link. As soon as your friend uses the discount, you’ll get 30% of their first payment credited to your account.
Italian Tutor Near Me – Wyzant
Wyzant is a famous site for finding a wide variety of tutors, including all academic subjects, music, art, and more. Though Wyzant tutors appear not to require any university degree or being a native speaker, most of them are seasoned tutors with a higher price. You can check all the tutors’ detailed information in their profile.
What is special about Wyzant?
Wyzant offers not only online Italian tutors but also in-person ones(the US only). The other main feature for Wyzant is that they have their learning platform, including whiteboard, real-time document, and they even have a code editor(of course, for engineers).
Get free Italian lessons and discounts
Wyzant does not provide free lessons or discounts. However, they’ve got a Good Fit Guarantee which they guarantee if you are unhappy with your tutor after the first hour, they will refund your purchase or help find you another tutor at no additional cost.
And you can get $40 in free tutoring by registering through my promo link.
Yes. Whenever you have your account, you can start to share your promo link to others and get $40 for each friend who completes a lesson as well.
Find Online Italian Tutor – Italki
Italki shares the biggest market in the tutoring industry. Founded in 2006, Italki has established a comprehensive learning ecosystem for both tutors and students. They have the largest number of tutors, an intuitive user interface, and a community for students to discuss their problems. Italki doesn’t provide a video chat system, you need to provide your skype ID.
What is special about Italki?
So, what is special about Italki? Italki has separated two different teacher types, one is professional teachers while the other one is community tutors. Professional teachers are guaranteed to have certifications but with higher prices, while community tutors are just native speakers or advanced learners want to help your speaking practice with lower prices. Sometimes, you could find some decent community tutors if you’re lucky enough.
Price From: $10
Payment options: Visa, Mastercard, Paypal, Alipay, Skrill eWallet and Bank Transfer
Flexibility of lesson plans ★★★★★
You can add any amount of credits, ranging from 1 to whatever amount you’d like to add. Then you can use your credit to buy either one lesson or multiple lessons. Usually, the more you buy, the more discounts you get (depends on tutors).
User Experience ★★★★✩
Italki has a much better user experience after its redesign. More elegant and more intuitive. All the functions you’ll use on your dashboard.
Customer Support ★★★✩✩
There’s only support center on Italki. If you can’t figure out by browsing those materials. You’ll need to wait for a long time by contacting them through email.
Get free Italian lessons and discounts
Due to its leading position in the market, Italki barely gives any discounts. Though some teachers offer discounts if a student buys more lessons, popular teachers usually don’t provide any discounts. Teachers can decide their price and how many discounts they would like to give.
Boost your Italian language learning
Apart from the paid lessons, Italki also provides a community where you can find language exchange partners. By picking a good partner, you can have additional practice with native Italian speakers. What’s more, you can write essays, ask questions, and let other native Italian speakers correct your writing or answer you in the community. The whole community is quite active, most posts got responses.
Find Italian teachers – Verbling
Verbling is almost the same size as Preply, they’ve got about 150 Italian tutors. On Verbling, there are featured tutors to let students recognize who might be more professional. You can also see how many students a tutor has taught on their profile. Verbling offers transparent teacher stats, including attendance rate, total lessons, lessons per student.
What is special about Verbling?
Unlike other platforms focusing more on matching tutors, Verbling offers a wide variety of useful tools for students to learn a new language. They have their own classroom, you don’t need to go to Skype to have lessons with your tutors. They have a workspace inside the classroom, your tutor would put all the teaching materials there and you can easily review.
Price From: $6
Payment options: Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Discover, Paypal, Alipay, Wechat and many other forms(depends on country)
Flexibility of lesson plans ★★★★✩
Verbling offers 1, 5, 10, 20 and 50 lessons. You can get discounts when buying 5, 10, 20 or 50 lessons, but the amount of discounts also depends on each tutor.
User Experience ★★★★★
Verbling’s user interface is not the most beautiful, but it offers virtual classrooms and vocabulary decks to help your Italian language learning.
Customer Support ★★★★★
You can get instant help at the bottom right corner of the page. The Verbling team members usually replie within an hour. You can search for FAQs in the chat box as well.
Get free Italian lessons and discounts
Verbling provides a one-third price of the first trial lesson which takes half of the normal lesson time. Verbling occasionally offers some marketing activity, but not that often. Sometimes they give 10% to 15% discounts while sometimes they might offer you a free lesson on condition that you buy a 20 lesson package. Cause there’s not a clear pattern, so I couldn’t figure out when to get these discounts. But most of the time you can expect tutors giving 10% to 25% discounts if you buy more than 5 lessons.
Boost your Italian language learning
I think the most appealing feature on Verbling must be the vocabulary deck. You can add any new words you don’t know to your deck, and review them in your free time. The repetition system is quite like Duolingo or Quizlet. Moreover, you can explore decks created by other learners.
Find Italian tutor online – AmazingTalker
AmazingTalker is quite young comparing to all three companies listed above, however, they are expanding quickly because they have given tutors many incentives, and accumulated a group of excellent tutors. They’re also the only company that features offering Italian tutors who can speak your mother tongue. Though not having as many teachers as Italki, Preply, and Verbling. You can expect to find a tutor proper for you by their transparency of teachers’ educational background, work experience, and students’ comments.
What is special about AmazingTalker?
The biggest difference that makes AmazingTalker stands out is that they have an impressive AI recommendation system in which you can simply answer some basic requirements and you can get responses within a few hours. In addition, all the teachers on the platform are well trained, they know how to guide an Italian newbie, even not knowing a single Italian word.
Price From: $5
Payment options: VISA, Mastercard and JCB
Flexibility of lesson plans ★★★★★
You can buy from 1 to 100 lessons according to your needs. AmazingTalker offers discounts for packages of 5, 10, 20 lessons. You can also discuss with your tutors if they offer more discounts on buying more than 20 lessons.
User Experience ★★★★✩
The general use experience is good on AmazingTalker, easy to look for a new tutor, easy to get access to your first lesson. However, some users complain about not able to manage their previous lessons neatly.
Customer Support ★★★★★
The customer service support is at the bottom right corner. You can contact team members if you face any problems. The average response time on AmazingTalker is within an hour on weekdays and hours on weekends.
Get free Italian lessons and discounts
Since AmazingTalk is new to the market, it’s giving an incredible amount of discounts to students. You have a 5% off discount on a 5 lesson package, 10% off on a 10 lesson package, 15% off on a 20 lesson package. Moreover, right after you finish your trial lesson with a tutor, you’ll get a 10 USD discount to buy the tutor’s lessons. If that’s not enough, share your referral link to your friends, you can get 10 USD once your friends buy a lesson. The most important of all, they are having crazy sales every February and August. You can expect to buy one and get one free lesson during that time. Check their Italian Tutors.
Boost your Italian language learning
Though not having a sound classroom system like Verbling, but their tutors are well trained to use Zoom which is a video chat app you can have better lesson experience than Skype. Also, most tutors make use of Google Docs to manage all the teaching materials that students can review or complete their homework.
Find Italian tutors near me – HeyTutor
HeyTutor is a platform that allows students to hire tutors. They cover topics such as math, science, test preparation, social studies, and language. The tutor finding process on HeyTutor is not that transparent. It doesn’t allow you to browse any of their tutors. Even after you fill out the requesting form, you still can’t look at tutors’ profiles. While it claims that you can get tutors’ response within 20 minutes, the actual time is far more than that.
What is special about HeyTutor?
They offer two different kinds of service. The one is on-demand online tutoring, in which you can enjoy lessons from the comfort of your own home. The other one is private in-person tutoring, in which you can get HeyTutor handpicked candidates, along with background checks(extra money needed).
Price From: $20
Payment options: Visa, Mastercard
Flexibility of lesson plans ★★★✩✩
You can buy 10, 20 or 30 hours of tutoring. All lessons are pre-paid with a one-time purchase. You can renew your package plan if you need more hours.
User Experience ★★★★✩
The general user experience is good. However, much information is not allowed to display when a user does not sign in. You can’t preview tutors. And if you want to know more about a tutor, usually you have to contact the tutor.
Customer Support ★★★★★
There’s not much information in the FAQs, but they offer phone customer support. You can simply have a call to solve the problems you meet.