[Tips] How to hire a tutor to practice conversation with

One of the easiest ways to get lots of speaking practice is to hire a tutor. You can either hire someone online or find a tutor locally. Hiring a tutor online from iTalki iTalki is a service that allows you to find tutors for pretty much any language you want to learn. iTalki offers two kinds of teachers: professional teachers (with certification) or community tutors (non-certified). After you find a tutor that you like, you can check his or her schedule for an opening and book a lesson. You pay the tutor by first buy iTalki credit, then use the credit to pay your tutor. Once paid, you will be given the tutor’s Skype ID, and you can call the tutor at the time you agreed on. Preply is also an option. However, they advertise that they offer local tutors, but in fact they only offer online tutors. I think this is false advertising. https://i.redd.it/4ocub3tdf4y21.png Often you search for “Mandarin tutor in New York” you see Preply among the top results. You click into the website, and they even show a box that lets you enter “location” field. However, the results are online tutors—they are most likely in China and not in New York! TutorMandarin is also an option, although I personally dislike them because they used to spam my YouTube channel my leaving the same promotional comment below many of my videos. Their way of marketing is very disrespectful and questionable. I’m not sure about the quality of their tutors, but I’ll let you make your own decision. Online tutoring is an affordable and convenient way to get a lot of speaking practice. The downside is that sometimes the audio or video isn’t very good, and sometimes you have to deal with bad internet connections. Because you’re not in the same physical space, simple things like gestures, pointing, or looking at a piece of text together can be a challenge. Sometimes there are lags over the the internet, which means you might want to say something, only to discover that your tutor is also trying to say something because he or she hasn’t caught up with the video stream yet. During a bad internet connection, the chat window is your friend. Ask your tutor to type any expressions that you don’t understand in the chat box so you can look them up in a dictionary or review them later. Hiring a local tutor locally Learning with a tutor face to face can be a little bit more expensive, and it means you’ll have to travel to a physical location to have your lesson. But the benefits are you won’t have to deal with audio or video issues. You will always be able to hear and see your tutor clearly. He or she will not freeze in front you due to a bad internet connection. You can go to a local Chinese neighbourhood or shopping centre and see if there are academies there. I found my Korean tutor in China through an academy located in my local mall. Eventually I had to move back to Canada and carry the lessons by WeChat video calls. Eventually I also found a local tutor in Canada, also through a small academy at a local Chinese shopping mall. You can also search for local tutors on Google or Craigslist. If you are in Canada, LanguageTutors.ca is a website in Canada that allows you to find local tutors in Canadian cities. Since all you want is some speaking practice, it doesn’t really matter if your tutor has a teaching background or not. So if you know anyone from China you can hire him or her as your tutor as long as he or she speaks good Mandarin. submitted by /u/ChineseZeroToHero [link] [comments]

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