RE italki. I have had about 20 lessons so far and was very lucky with my teachers. This is my advice:
start sooner than later, ideally, start tomorrow. It’s the best thing you can do for your Japanese. WK people often live in a bubble.
don‘t feel ashamed. You are where you are. Nobody’s gonna judge you, they’re here to help.
choose in the following order: sympathy (introduction video), price, availability. I had two teachers that didn’t work that well because one was expensive and the other one was never free when I was free. I now have found the perfect one and booked her every week at the same weekday and time. Don‘t book a teacher because she/he is cute. This is not a date, this is a lesson. I would say from my experience, that middle aged women are the best teachers, because a large number of middle aged women are in fact Japanese teachers. They are very experienced.
book a trial lesson, if you feel at ease with the teacher, stay, if not, try others.
stick with your plan no matter what. There will be days where you can‘t fumble a sentence together and days when you‘ll feel like Murakami. That’s normal. Keep going, you can only get better if you overcome your fears and self-conciousness.
just.keep.going
set a goal such as „I will show up every week for a year„
a good teacher encourages you, makes it easy for you to talk, never uses English, corrects you, but not always so you don’t feel stupid, is empathetic and supportive. You‘ll know, when you‘ve found your teacher.
Once you found your teacher stick with them
You should go for half conversation and half grammar. I found that to be perfect. Most teachers are familiar with all the usual textbooks. My lesson is 35min conversation and 25min Tobira with informal teaching/exercises.
maybe book 30min lessons first, 60min can be exhausting at the beginning. Maybe 2 30min lessons a week?
you can also have two teachers: a more expensive professional for grammar, and a cheap one for just conversation
and now get off the forum, watch the teacher’s videos and book a trial lesson. NOW
Level 52 vocab is the toughest I have seen so far. Loads of abstract meanings and strange readings. I have around 40 I cannot shift to Apprentice 2 and I level up tomorrow (to be fair, I have been neglecting them a bit)
After 80 days on Level 7 (I’m sure we all can agree that 2020, was ROUGH), I have reached Level 8! While it may seem small, I’m super proud to have pushed through and look forward to more consistency in 2021!
Thank you for great guidelines and hints! Now I feel myself a quite confident. Still have to get new phone though, since italki is refusing to support Android 4 of my pre-historic Galaxy S3.
So true. Scrolling now through the teacher list on italki web and bookmarking some of them and it’s hard not to fall into cuteness trap. Always have to remind myself I’m here for language skills and keep my reason sense awake.
Still, it’s a faint edge between aforesaid and just a pleasant teacher I’d happy to talk with, w/o interfering thoughts.
At the pace I am going all the levels sort of merge into one to be honest!
I’m sure I have apprentice items from the last few levels floating about, plus items I keep failing at enlightened level, which is becoming quite tough for me also. I’ve got 234 apprentice items, easily more than I’ve ever had, and it’s been rising ever since I hit the fast levels.
I am managing to get the review queue down right now, but if it becomes unbearably so I might have to slow down. We’ll see!
(Reordering reviews is a big part of the problem, sometimes I do neglect the vocab and it comes back around to bite me)
Ugh, all these enlightens but no burns are making me antsy. It sucks because I know I won’t have my first burns until March and that’s just too far away for me >:(
I am still here I have a backlog of posts on this thread. I have been preparing for an exam in IRL (unrelated to Japanese), so I haven’t been spending a lot of time on the forum in the new year. Hopefully things will be back to normal in 2-3 weeks.
NOW 
(to be fair, I have been neglecting them a bit)
I have a backlog of posts on this thread. I have been preparing for an exam in IRL (unrelated to Japanese), so I haven’t been spending a lot of time on the forum in the new year. Hopefully things will be back to normal in 2-3 weeks.