As the title says I’m looking to improve my speaking!
I have tried hellotalk and Tandem but they both haven’t helped much. iTalki I have also used but I don’t think I have found a good enough teacher for me! So any advice?? Or maybe any good teachers on iTalki? Thanks!
Finding a teacher isn´t always easy but I think you should keep looking for one, send message and have a good discussion about what you want.
You can also use Asao, it´s cheaper and you can easily take a lesson with a lot of teachers until you find a good one for you.
My brother was taking lessons with a teacher and they would play Keep talking and nobody explode to practice speaking. He had lesson with 3 or 4 different teachers before finding a good one and also, understand what was good for him.
Moreover, why not trying reading texts out loud ? This is a good exercize to smoothen your speech
Good is such a relative thing with teachers. One person’s awesome best teacher is another’s mediocre teacher. It’s half about motivation on both sides, and half about mutual chemistry. A good teacher will make you want to talk more, engage you in small talk and encourage you to talk about yourself. You’ll find yourself looking forward to the lessons with a good teacher.
It may cost a bit more in the long run, but buying a single lesson from multiple teachers (many have an introductory first lesson price on iTalki) will help you narrow down the right one.
Hey,
at my university they hold a “language cafe” once a week on campus. There you can just grab a little flag of your desired conversation language, sit at a table, pop the flag up and wait for people to sit with you. I heard that it works quite fine and it isn’t limited to students so maybe there is a similar thing close to where you are.
Furthermore if you live in a big city, there should be a japanese community of some sort. These communities usually also have regular come-togethers not only with people born in Japan who immigrated to your place but also partners of those people and those who are simply interested (like you!). Maybe you could join them?
Are you dead set on finding a teacher-student relationship or are you just looking to improve your speaking in general? If the latter, I’d look into online forums of your interests. Especially if you’re into video games or something else that’s collaborative and remote, you could try finding a group or server with Japanese people who share your same interests. A lot of online games benefit from having group chats with your party players for example, which would be a good way to get a lot of speaking practice albeit in a more casual setting. Of course it depends on your interests, but I know people who have made friends with native speakers trough discord, reddit, and the like.
I think I tried around 20 different teachers on italki before finding the one I have studied with for 2 years now.
Italki is good but you need to spend time on finding a teacher that’s a good fit for you.
Btw, price is not a good indicator of “quality”. I was paying $17/hr for my classes and the amount of effort the teacher was putting in was far beyond many $25+/hr “professional” teachers out there.
I used to use that but the hour long sessions were quite tiring for me, especially after working a full day.
@Gorganite I had the same issue! I know I’m beating a dead horse here, but finding the right teacher is huge. I was going hard with one formal teacher and a few informal teachers with 3-4 lessons a week. My formal teacher and I had such a bad chemistry that it totally wrecked everything for me. I’m back in the game now, and have found a formal teacher that I get along with so much better. I’m only a few weeks back into the game, but it’s night and day. I actually look forward to my hour long lessons with this teacher, because it’s fun!
No matter what you are doing to study, if it’s not enjoyable, it will not last. Always step back and check:
“hey am I looking forward to these lessons?”
“am I enjoying every step of the process?”
etc
My $0.02 for what it’s worth. Don’t force any part of the language learning journey. Simply find things (be it books, teachers, or study methods) that you enjoy, and do them. And if you don’t? Drop it, and search for something new. Is it going to be the most effective? Maybe, maybe not. I can guarantee that it’ll be more effective than something that you end up dropping because you hate though.
Highly recommend Chigako on Italki. She is a native Japanese married to a German man, so her german is better than her english, but her english is passable. We communicate about 95% in Japanese, 4% in german and 1% English. She is very patient, caring and knowledgeable, but also strict when it comes to homework and language consistency. She also has a huge interest in idioms, which if anything else, I find fun as a language learner.
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