[RawToast]

gaiaslastlaugh Wrote:

RawToast Wrote:I am really into italki recently, so far I've completed 10 hours of lesson for the challenge -- and have my second lesson of the day in 25 minutes! Is anyone else here taking part in the 20 hour challenge?

Yep I'm heavily back loaded though - only eight hours finished so far, with another lesson tonight and then the remaining 11 (eep) scheduled from now until end of month.

You're almost half way, plenty of time to complete the hours and make $30 I am barely ahead of you, with 11.5 hours of lessons.

Quote:How the hell do you people afford all this tutoring? I can sorta understand Japonin, but italki, depending on the tutor, can become a hefty amount. To some extent I want to use italki because I'm not the biggest fan of learning in a group. Obviously you have to pay more for private tutoring, but man... And the times on Japonin aren't really great when it comes to advanced courses.

A full time job helps Jokes aside, some of the tutors are cheaper on italki than on Japonin. Japonin is about $8-9 per 50 minutes (so ~$10 for an hour), but it depends on the package. My tutors on italki cost the following:

"Professional Teacher 1": $15 per hour, but I pay $19 for 90min ~$12 ph.
"Professional Teacher 2": $12 per hour, I pay $11 each as a block of 10. and gives me plenty of homework. This teacher is based in the US, which lets me have lessons midweek. I'll be reducing my hours with this tutor shortly after the challenge.
"Community Teacher": $7 per hour, I pay ~$6.25 each as a block of 5. This community teacher prefers conversation practice and keeps in contact on Skype outside of lesson hours.

So whilst iTalki can be expensive, with lesson "blocks" it does become comparable with Japonin. There are some teachers who are more expensive than mine, I have no idea if they are better. e.g. I saw a Community teacher (with plenty of happy students) who was teaching by reading and talking about Yotsuba, but the lessons were ~$20 an hour!

As a final comparison, my university course costs £270 (~$350) for ~20 lessons (2 hours long) and 3 exams. For that price I could've had 20-30 private lessons on iTalki or JOI; I feel either would've been more effective.

After the challenge, I'll give JOI another try. The lesson times were better for me than iTalki (the UK is 9 hours behind Japan) for midweek lessons. I didn't mind having other students with me, as we could really push the source material (as long as they were capable).

I finished my third lesson of the trial period at JOI this morning. Overall I think it was a positive experience and I'll be signing up for more lessons.

First a little bit of background: I started studying Japanese about 5 years ago with RTK. I was really serious about it for a while, but during the past 2 years or so I've hardly done any studying at all. Also all my studying to date was focused solely on reading and listening. My comprehension is pretty high but my output ability is close to zero. I had never actually spoken Japanese before trying out JOI.

My first class was therefore in the beginner section. There was one other student with me and the lesson focused on a single grammar point. We would take turns speaking and doing the drills, and after every answer the instructor would ask us follow up questions about our response which gave us the opportunity to have a mini conversation before moving on to the next point. This was a lot of fun to do even though the grammar was simple.

My next class had two other students and a different instructor. For this lesson we had to use the grammar point to describe a picture shown on the screen, and after that the teacher had two of us roleplay a conversation and then attempt to continue it afterwards. I don't think it went quite as well because the conversations usually petered out pretty quickly once we exhausted the script.

The third class was a low-intermediate conversation class. There were four of us for this one. I went into this one expecting to be disappointed but it actually worked a lot better than I expected. Everyone was given the topic in advance and the teacher's job was limited to prompting people to speak and ask questions, which kept the conversation going at a good rate and gave everyone plenty of opportunity to talk. I was probably the worst speaker of the lot with a lot of unfinished sentences and awkward pauses, but it sounded like everyone was having a good time.

The most important thing I took away from these lessons is that it's pretty clear that I need to sit down with a grammar textbook and do a lot of exercises so I'm not spending a lot of time searching for a way to express myself. Hopefully doing that in conjunction with taking 2 or 3 lessons a week will help me start to improve my speaking ability.

TheVinster Wrote:How the hell do you people afford all this tutoring?

I make a lot of money.

Like RawToast said, you can do it on the cheap by leveraging community tutors, or taking informal lessons with professional teachers.

gaiaslastlaugh Wrote:

TheVinster Wrote:How the hell do you people afford all this tutoring?

I make a lot of money.

Like RawToast said, you can do it on the cheap by leveraging community tutors, or taking informal lessons with professional teachers.

I figured as much from your LinkedIn, haha.

Meh I might still try a professional tutor. If it helps me get over the current wall that I've hit then I'm okay with that.