13 italki Alternatives for Learning a Language with Native Speakers
italki is one of the most popular language-learning platforms today for a reason: it lets you find online tutors or conversation partners for nearly any language.
But in spite of its many benefits, it isn’t the only choice on the market.
In fact, there are 13 great alternatives you can use to get many of the benefits italki offers—and perhaps more, depending on your learning style!
Best italki Alternatives for Finding Language Tutors
italki can help you connect with a native speaker to serve as a teacher or tutor. Teachers and tutors can present you with targeted instruction to help you meet your learning goals. You can also find language teachers and tutors through the following services.
Preply offers thousands of language tutors, including more than 1,300 tutors for Arabic, 2,000 for Chinese, 11,000 for English, 1,600 for French, 900 for German, 1,200 for Italian, 900 for Japanese, 400 for Korean, 700 for Portuguese, 500 for Russian and 4,000 for Spanish.
You can search tutors by price, language, nationality and availability to locate your perfect match.
Tutors are available 24/7, so you can schedule lessons that work for you. Lessons are transmitted via video through Preply, so you can access them from whatever location is convenient for you.
Live Lingua offers flexible, personalized one-to-one Spanish lessons with professional teachers.
It’s very customizable. You share your goals, learning style and educational history and a class coordinator will select a tutor for you. You don’t have to spend hours staring at profiles trying to decide whom to choose.
Live Lingua also provides a free one-hour trial lesson so you can make sure Live Lingua is right for you before you commit.
Verbling has over 10,000 teachers who provide instruction in more than 50 languages.
Verbling offers professional teachers who are native speakers, and lessons are personalized. Lessons are held directly through Verbling (not Skype or Zoom), and the service works in your browser or through your favorite device.
It has additional language tools, such as vocabulary review and collaborative text pads. Verbling can also help you connect with a community of other language learners for a little extra moral support.
AmazingTalker interviews its tutors and verifies their profiles.
You’ll have access to introduction videos, resumes and student feedback to help you select your ideal tutor.
It’s very flexible and lessons are customized for students.
AmazingTalker lessons are conducted via video calls on Zoom, so you can take your lessons via mobile device or computer.
Best italki Alternatives for Language Exchange
When you participate in a language exchange, you use conversation to improve your language skills. Generally, you’ll partner with a native speaker of your target language. You’ll help them learn your language, and they’ll help you learn theirs through practice and interaction.
HiNative is a question-and-answer platform that allows you to ask native speakers questions about pronunciation, grammar, vocabulary and any other topic that comes up as you study your target language.
You can enter your question as text and/or upload audio and photos for your question, allowing you to ask about your pronunciation or a certain word you saw and couldn’t figure out.
Run by Dickinson College, this free language exchange site connects language learners. You can meet your partner through this site and then use Skype or Zoom for your language exchange.
Mixxer also offers a service where a native speaker can correct your written work.
Thousands of users have posted profiles that detail their native languages and what they’re learning. All you have to do is sign up to start looking for your new language exchange partner.
My Language Exchange is an online community that hosts three million members from 175 countries who are practicing more than 160 languages.
You can use My Language Exchange’s member search tool to find partners based on native language, the language they’re practicing, country, city, age, gender and more.
Once you’ve found your perfect partner, My Language Exchange can hook you up with lesson plans, text chat rooms, links to free voice chat rooms, hangman word games and so much more. With so many resources, your language exchange never has to have a dull moment!
Polyglot Club lets you meet up for a language exchange in real life. You can filter results by city which lets you find someone near you who wants to meet up.
There’s online chatting, a search feature to help you find friends and the option to post text for native speakers to correct.
Polyglot Club even hosts meetings around the world where you can connect with other language aficionados and maybe find your new language exchange bestie.
As always, be careful when meeting people in person. Never share your home address, and be sure to meet in public places.
Best italki Alternatives for Listening to Native Speakers
One key element of italki services is interacting with native speakers. However, not all language learners are comfortable speaking just yet.
Luckily, that doesn’t mean you have to miss out on the benefits of listening to native speakers. There are some great options for listening to native speakerswithout the intimidation factor of speaking to them.
Price: Monthly and yearly subscriptions; 14-day free trial available
FluentU’s language lessons are crafted from videos made by native speakers. These include clips of movie trailers, informational talks, news snippets, music videos and more.
Each video comes with interactive captions that instantly give you access to a spoken word’s definition and example sentences. And if certain vocabulary catches your interest, FluentU can pinpoint it in different videos to help you understand its usage.
For extra review, you can check out vocabulary lists per video and save new words as multimedia flashcards. The app then comes up with personalized quizzes for you, with speaking exercises included on mobile.
Since it emphasizes giving a broad and realistic picture of a language, FluentU can help learners of any level to build more confidence in their listening and speaking skills.
YouTube may be your favorite way to kill a few minutes with fun videos you’ll want to share with your friends, but it can also be your ticket to language learning success.
People around the world upload videos to YouTube, which means there’s authentic content available in virtually any language you can imagine.
To find channels in your target language, just use Channel Crawler. You can filter Youtube channels by country, language and subscriber count. The app even sorts videos for you based on categories, including news, entertainment and travel.
However, not all videos offer captions, so YouTube is often a more appropriate option for more advanced students.
Maybe italki isn’t up your alley. Or maybe you simply want more great resources to add to your learning routine.
Regardless of your need for choices, these 13 italki alternatives can provide you with terrific, interactive language learning!
