By aromiekim and mosehayward Last updated: May 13, 2023

The Best Spanish Tutors Online to Improve Your Spanish Skills (Updated for 2023)

Thanks to the internet nowadays, you can easily find and connect with a Spanish tutor online.

And in this post, you’ll learn exactly how to do that in 2022!

As a bunch of linguaphiles who speak several languages, we’re pretty experienced when it comes to learning languages online. Every sort of website, app or platform for finding and learning with tutors—we’ve been there.

Today we’ll share our top resources for finding the best online Spanish tutors, as well as how to choose the best ones, organize your lessons and other tips for optimizing your experience of learning Spanish online.

Let’s get started.

Where to Find the Best Spanish Tutor Online
How to Learn With Your Spanish Tutor Online
- Choosing Your Spanish Tutor Online
- Planning Your Lessons
FAQs About Online Spanish Tutors

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Where to Find the Best Spanish Tutor Online

1. Best Budget: italki

Pricing: $4+/hour

Summary: This platform has a huge variety of Spanish tutors from all backgrounds and education levels. Plus, extremely affordable (and flexible) lessons.

This is my hands-down favorite.

There are hundreds of Spanish tutors, and the search feature allows you to quickly narrow them down to someone who has the accent you want (from Cuba? Chile? etc.) and is available at a time and price that fits your budget.

You can choose between accredited teachers (“Professional Teachers”) and regular native speakers willing to patiently practice with you (“Community Tutors”).

You pay for and schedule the lessons on the site, and can hold them in the “italki classroom” or another video chatting software like Skype or Zoom.

Read our full review here.

2. Best Tutor Variety: Preply

Pricing: $3+/hour

Summary: This platform has thousands of Spanish tutors with a layout that’s easy to navigate.

Preply hosts over 9,000 online tutors for the Spanish language alone.

You can search and pick your tutor based on their profiles, which include their nationality, language specialties, service rates, proficiency in the English language and the current number of students they teach.

Once you find the right tutor, you can choose from a number of hour-based lesson packages. Before your decision, Preply even lets you have a “trial lesson” with tutors to see if they fit your needs correctly.

One of the greatest benefits to Preply’s system is its flexibility.

Preply’s tutor pool has a wide variety of hourly rates, so you can make a choice that fits your language goals and budget.

Additionally, your tutoring sessions revolve around your schedule—you can start and have your lessons whenever you want, with the option to reschedule if something comes up.

3. Best Ease of Search: Verbling

Pricing: $5+/hour

Summary: This user-friendly platform makes it quick and easy to find tutors, though you’re limited to only contacting your tutor through the website.

I tried this one out to write this article.

The search results appear smoother than on most others.

Teachers’ availability and YouTube introductions pop up as you hover over them, which is neat.

The classes take place within the site and through a version of Google Hangouts, which presents the advantages and disadvantages of that software.

The whiteboards and chats can’t be saved though, and the software blocks you from sharing email addresses (which I wanted to do so that my teacher could email me the history from our lesson). So, you might want another option if any of that is important to you.

4. Best In-Person: WyzAnt

Pricing: $10+/hour

Summary: This website matches you with well-qualified tutors in your area, to either meet up in-person or learn with online.

WyzAnt is an incredible resource for locating stellar Spanish teachers near you.

The site is professional and polished, and it features well-educated and well-qualified tutors in your local area. Follow this link to see who's available close to home.

WyzAnt also asks which grade and skill level you have as a student.

Slots are available for everything from elementary to adult, and you’ll be matched with someone who’s trained to cater to your specific needs.

Each tutor reveals how much they charge per hour, and you can take a look at some of the ratings that other people have given them. It seems like most of the tutors are available for in-person sessions, but some of them offer online training.

5. Best Monthly Subscription: Spanish55.com

Pricing: $31-$35 per lesson, depending on your subscription plan (one, two or three lessons per week)

Summary: This platform starts with a virtual consultation, and then lets you access high-quality tutors for a monthly fee.

The platform is managed well and its teaching staff are high-quality, according to many reviews.

Spanish55’s tutoring plan starts with a virtual consultation that acts as your “trial experience.”

Within the consultation, you can discuss your Spanish language goals so that your prospective tutor can come up with a teaching agenda.

Afterward, you choose your tutoring subscription plan and get access to your own student portal, where you can access your tutor’s availability and schedule your lessons whenever you’d like.

The pricing system is based on a monthly subscription, but you can conveniently change it at any time.

6. Best Tutor Matches: AmazingTalker

Pricing: $11+/hour

Summary: With this user-friendly platform, you can search for your ideal tutor or be matched with one.

AmazingTalker lets you search for and privately message the Spanish tutor that you’re interested in. From there, you can book a lesson time slot with the tutor, who will give the lesson over any topic you request.

If you need help finding the right tutor, you can also use the “Match me with tutors” option and leave a request for what kind of material you’d like to use during lessons.

AmazingTalker will then instantly match you with the tutor who best meets your current needs.

Another appealing feature is its “pay-as-you-go” pricing system.

Unlike other tutor services, AmazingTalker lets you pay for lessons as you need them. This can be very useful if you believe you’d work better with individual or isolated tutor sessions.

7. Best Small-Scale Platform: SpanishSkype

Pricing: $12+/hour

Summary: These affordable lessons are held on Skype, with the ability to contact your tutor through email if needed.

SpanishSkype is exactly what it sounds like—you get one-on-one Spanish lessons with a tutor, and all you need to sign up is a Skype account.

It’s a great choice if you’re not a fan of any digital baggage you might have to download with other tutor platforms.

There are currently nine Spanish tutors available, each of them native speakers with a great deal of teaching experience.

Every lesson—customized based on your request—is 55 minutes long. Outside of lessons, you can email your tutor and ask for supplemental material as needed.

8. Best for Feedback: Live Lingua

Pricing: $19-25/hour

Summary: This platform matches you with tutors according to your learning preferences and needs, and they’re great at assessing your progress.

Live Lingua’s tutoring system is robust and streamlined, and there’s plenty to like about it.

You can start requesting Spanish lessons immediately after signing up.

There are also several options besides just “Standard Spanish”—Live Lingua also offers specific courses such as “Spanish for Business” and “Spanish for Priests.”

Once you define your learning goals, you’ll be paired with a tutor who best fits your needs and skill level.

One very helpful feature is the evaluation system.

As you progress through your lessons, your tutor will consistently assess your skills and provide feedback on how you’re doing to keep you motivated and grounded in your studies.

Live Lingua also offers a ton of free material as part of its Live Lingua Project.

You can get your hands on many helpful Spanish language handouts and content, from PDFs to MP3 audio files—and you don’t even need to be in a course to access them!

Bonus Resources to Supplement Your Online Tutor Lessons

Verbalplanet.com. I’ve previously tried this website but it tends to be more expensive for basically the same features.
fiverr.com. My editor suggests Fiverr, which offers a very cheap way to get short online practice sessions with native speakers, but it lacks the language-specific search functionalities of the sites above specifically built for language learners.
Chegg.com. This could be an option if you’re looking for a tutor to help you prepare for a specific test like AP Spanish.
Free language exchange websites. If you’re looking for a free language exchange, try polyglotclub.com and put up a notice in your target country’s discussion group on bewelcome.com (or its more popular but patently evil twin couchsurfing.com).

How to Learn With Your Spanish Tutor Online

Choosing Your Spanish Tutor Online

Before choosing a Spanish tutor online, list the criteria you need them to meet. At a minimum, these are the features I look for the most:

Native speaker. Not only will you learn to speak Spanish like a native yourself, but having a native tutor will also let you choose which accent or local dialect you want to focus on (such as Mexican, Chilean, Colombian, etc.). There are big differences between Spain and Latin American Spanish!
Experience level. Do you want an experienced or inexperienced teacher? You may sometimes want an inexperienced tutor, especially if you’re intermediate or advanced. I prefer to use a mixture of the two.
Good vibe. Being patient, funny and interesting is much more important than your tutor’s degree. You want a teacher who’s a joy to talk to so that you’ll be motivated to continue the classes.
Teaching style. We all have different learning styles, and as the excellent “How Languages Are Learned” points out, the best style for learners tends to be the one that they believe is best. So feel free to ignore my and all other advice if you find something that works for you, and find a teacher who matches that style.

Planning Your Lessons

Here are some ideas for your first Spanish lessons with an online tutor:

Use a Spanish textbook. You can start your lessons with a traditional Spanish learning book and work through the lessons one by one.
Greetings. Look at pictures of people meeting each other and role-play as the people in the pictures. What formal and informal differences do you find? What are slang greetings in your teacher’s country? How do people kiss each other hello, and when do they shake hands?
Describing people. Look at pictures of people from around the world and use basic adjectives to describe them. How do these words change if you’re talking about a woman? Who can you describe from your own life? You can then show your tutor pictures from your Facebook page, Instagram or even a physical photo album, and talk about them.
Your interests. What do you like/dislike? Use the basic expression me gusta(n)… (I like…) and no me gusta(n)… (I don’t like…) followed by the thing in question. Then turn the tables and ask your tutor: ¿Te gusta(n)… (Do you like…?)
Your daily activities. What do you typically do on the weekdays? Weekends? What are some of your favorite things to do? As a bonus, you can include specific times or temporal words.
Talk about current events. Practice your ability to retell information and express thoughts and opinions in Spanish by discussing popular current events during your lesson. Your tutor can respond back and give you the extra prod to challenge your capabilities.
Describing your goals. Your tutor will need to know your Spanish learning goals, so why not communicate them in Spanish? If you know them, practice your Spanish modal verbs like poder (can), deber (must), necesitar (need), saber (know) and tener que (have to). In turn, your tutor can respond and detail how they can help you reach them.

Advanced Topics to Study with Your Spanish Tutor

The subjunctive. The Spanish subjunctive mood is used to talk about wishes, doubts, desires and uncertainty, and it’s notorious for being difficult to master.
Reflexive verbs. Reflexive verbs are used when the subject does something to itself. Forget the pronoun and you can imply a different meaning to the verb. For example, lavar means “to wash,” but lavarse means “to wash oneself.”
Preterite tense vs. imperfect tense. Another common sore spot for learners is figuring out when to use preterite tense versus imperfect tense to describe past actions. Keep a Spanish diary where you log activities using the correct past tense. You can then read it to your tutor, who can point out incorrect usages.

Authentic language videos. One way to practice your vocabulary is to watch authentic Spanish video through, for example through YouTube or FluentU, a language learning website an app which turns content like music videos, inspiring talks and vlogs into immersive language lessons.

It pairs these authentic videos with aids—like interactive subtitles, multimedia flashcards and personalized quizzes—to make learning much faster and effective than doing it alone.

For example, instead of trawling through the internet to find engaging videos, then again to find definitions of all the words you hear, you pick from the curated library and use the learning aids to learn new vocabulary.

Then, use the content you watch on FluentU to start meaningful conversations with your tutor.

Unstructured “conversation” lessons. Once you can hold a basic conversation in Spanish, it can be relaxing, fun and useful to have a “conversation” lesson from time to time. To get the most out of this, write down new words from the lesson in your chat box or a notebook so you can come back to review them later.

Online Resources to Use with Your Spanish Tutors

Skype vs. Google Hangouts. These are the two major video chat systems people currently use for online language classes. Google Hangouts tends to have slightly better video quality in my experience, but also more technical glitches and slowdowns. Note that Google Hangouts chats disappear when you’re done with the session, so remember to save them! Using Skype with no video is a good option for the slowest connections.
Google Docs. When I’m working on my written skills, I share a document I’ve written with my teacher on Google Docs. We look at it and edit it together as we discuss it during class.
Google Translate and WordReference.com. These are the fastest ways to look up a word and expression if you or your teacher get stuck in the middle of a class.
Google Image. When a tutor uses a word you don’t know, encourage them to send you a link to a picture when possible, instead of translating the word into English. Isn’t this a more memorable way to learn the word pulpo?

What to Do After Your Online Spanish Lessons

It’s frustrating and all too common for the things you’ve learned in tutoring sessions to sink into unreachable folds of your unconscious.

Here are some tips on how to maximize your Spanish lessons and make leaps of progress toward your goals:

Schedule time the next day to review any new vocabulary. For example, turn the words in the chatbox that your tutor sent into flashcards.
Fcus on using the new vocabulary in real life. See if you can use the new words correctly by writing a short text and submitting it for correction on HiNative. Once you’ve posted it, native speakers will give feedback on your writing.
Sart preparing for your next lesson!

FAQs About Online Spanish Tutors

Why You Should Get a Spanish Tutor Online

Everyone can benefit from an online Spanish tutor, but the main benefits of having one are the following:

You don’t need to waste time transporting to and from a class.
It’s one-on-one (which means no listening to other students mangling the language).
It’s cheaper than language schools.
It’s easy to find a native speaker who tutors Spanish.
Classes can be individualized for your goals and learning style.

Who Should Use Spanish Tutors Online?

Whether you should invest in an online Spanish tutor or not will come down to your individual goals (and budget).

Here are some examples of people who would benefit:

People short on time. Spanish tutors online are often very flexible, so you can book last-minute sessions to suit your schedule. Plus, no travel is involved, making the process much faster.
People wanting to learn quickly. The learning you’ll get from tutors is often more intensive than a group or standard course. So if you want to learn as fast as you can, tutors could be a real help.
People stuck on a specific topic. If you’re having a lot of trouble with one aspect of the Spanish language (like the dreaded subjunctive), it’s worth getting a tutor to help you master it.
People on a budget. As we’ve seen, there are some extremely affordable tutors. More often than not, online Spanish tutors are much cheaper than finding a tutor for in-person sessions in your local area.

How Much Does a Spanish Tutor Online Cost?

You can expect to pay anywhere from $5 to $35 an hour for a Spanish tutor online, depending on the tutor’s experience level, group or private classes and the platform you use to book lessons.

For example, you’ll likely pay more for qualified, experienced tutors than you will for those who don’t have certifications or have little experience.

To avoid paying too much, always be sure to read reviews.

And there you have it—the best online platforms for booking quality sessions with a Spanish tutor online, plus how to make the most out of them.

Good luck!