Most language-learning apps are trying their own hand at standing out from the crowd with unique selling points. Memrise focuses on video, Pimsleur and Rocket Languages on audio and repetition, Duolingo on gamifying it, and Rosetta Stone on helping you “learn the way babies learn languages.” All of them are largely built around lessons, whatever they look like on their respective apps.

italki veers widely away from that format. You can hire professional instructors to teach you one-on-one or in group settings over video, and even that is more flexible and less rigid than other apps’ lessons, but italki’s focal point of matching you with other users to have unscripted conservations is its major selling point—and in some ways, its primary downside, too.

pros and cons

The Good

• Practice with real people
• Can pay for formalized instruction from professional instructors
• Free version is worthwhile

The Not-So-Good

• Instructor quality varies widely
• Finding a reliable user to chat with can be tough

how i tested

When it came to testing, I tried exclusively with Spanish because I already know a foundational amount of Spanish to put me firmly in the intermediate category of Spanish learners. That meant that I could interact with people well enough to hold a conversation without grunting the same 10 basic words to them like a caveman, as if I were a rank beginner learning a language. I also paid for a few lessons from two professional Spanish instructors.

what it’s like to practice language through italki

The crux of italki is that the app will match you with other users who will help you practice a language they speak natively, or at least well, and in turn you’ll help them learn the language(s) you know well. Often I found that I’d be giving English instruction to the same people who were helping me practice Spanish. There was no formalized or rigid process for determining how users would interact. It was left entirely up to us, with no guardrails.

It was refreshing, honestly. Typically another user and I would just switch back and forth between Spanish and English, each learning bit by bit. We talked about favorite hobbies and favorite foods. You know, small talk.

But I never knew what I was going to get. One person I met on italki I now consider a close friend. Many more taught me the kind of slang and expressions I wouldn’t learn from books and apps. Others just needled at my Latin American Spanish expressions or asked weird questions about America’s politics. It was a grab bag.

Language Selection

The italki website claims over 150 languages, but it’s hard to pin down exactly how many languages are on the app in the same way that Pimsleur conclusively says it offers 51 languages. Because language selection is only limited by whether there are people who speak your desired language on the platform, there are more languages to learn than, say, Babbel, but I found most learners were clustered around the usual suspects when it came to Western instruction. There was hardly anyone who wanted to practice Swahili, for example.

Neither did I feel comfortable practicing French. I simply don’t know the language well enough. italki replicates the positive aspects of conversing with people face-to-face, such as being more responsive and making it possible for you to discuss subjects that interest you, rather than staid lessons.

it also reproduces the negative aspects, too; namely, that I felt I needed a foundational understanding of grammar and basic vocabulary to get started with somebody on italki. If you dive into chatting directly with other users and have no prior knowledge of your target language, you’ll flounder. The few unlucky souls with whom I attempted Russian quickly lost interest in talking to me because it must’ve felt to them like talking to a parrot taught by a four-year-old.

After using italki to practice Spanish as a functional intermediate learner, French as a somewhat passable but firm beginner, and Russian as a rank beginner, I’ve determined that iTalki is best for somebody who’s at an advanced-beginner stage.

Hiring Professional Instructors

Hiring an instructor is a way to dive into a brand-new language or introduce more structure by a more capable learning partner, sometimes both at the same time, but the trade-off is that unlike the user-to-user practice, instructors aren’t doing it for free. Rather than pay for a monthly subscription or fixed price, you pay for credits through italki, which you pay to instructors who set their own rates, discounts, and class packages. Many offer heavily discounted trials. All instruction is over video. There are group classes, but italki leans more heavily on featured one-on-one instruction that’s therefore largely customized to you.

Not all instructors were “pro,” but I looked through a lot of instructor profiles across many languages, and the vast majority has impressive credentials as good as any I’d expect to see for an employee at a school or professional language-teaching workshop. Think fancy degrees and loads of experience on their resumes teaching their chosen languages professionally.

One of the instructors I chose to teach me intermediate Spanish seemed taken aback by my clumsiness with the language. She foundered for a while through our first (and last) lesson, despite her background as a professional teacher. The app is sometimes like this. I just didn’t always get a good match. Her preparation for our lesson was done prior to us ever talking, and she missed the mark, seemingly prepared for a much more advanced student than I was. Lots of the vocabulary went right over my head.

The next instructor, also credentialed with a professional background, did much better. We tackled a few lessons, and because I was talking to a real person in real time and not a rigid app, she could adjust and tailor the lesson to my interests and capabilities during the lesson. Speaking about motorcycles and guitar was a surefire way to snag my attention much more solidly than talking about theoretical directions to an non-existent birthday party, or whatever kind of junk the other language apps have me practicing.

other language apps worth checking out

I’ve raved about Pimsleur and how it takes what’s essentially an old-fashioned approach, packaged into in an app, and works wonderfully. At $21 per month for access to all 51 languages (and $20 per month for one language, which is pointless in my book), it’s not cheap, and at 30-minutes per lesson it’s not quick, but it is extraordinarily effective. It’s what I relied upon to improve my French (eventually) and to learn a working level of Swahili.

Check out my Pimsleur review.

Of all the language apps I’ve tried, Babbel’s is the most straightforward. Pimsleur’s might be a bit more old-fashioned, even though it works very, very well, but Babbel is precisely what I think of when I hear “language-learning app.” It presents lessons in an interactive format of multiple-choice quizzes, scripted fill-in-the-blank conversations, and short audio clips whereby you select the word you think you heard. Duolingo does all of that, too, but Babbel is more serious and not at all gamified. If Duolingo’s constant reminders to practice annoy you or if its humor wears thin on you, give Babbel a try.

Check out my Babbel review.

Can i start a new language with italki?

I wouldn’t. Diving right into the community chats with other users will be a mess, unless you’re some kind of prodigy with the ability to read minds. Beginning from scratch with a tutor hired through italki would work better, but honestly I think you’ll burn through a lot of money learning some easy wins on basic grammar and syntax. Not that instructors are particularly expensive on italki, but dropping $40 an hour or so to learn “Me gustan todos libros” isn’t a good use of your money. The wiser move is to study the basics of your target language in a book or the free version of Duolingo or Pimsleur first, and then jump into iTalki once you have a little bit of a foundation.

Do I have to teach somebody, too?

Not if you go the paid instructor route. If you’re chatting with another user, you don’t have to, but in my experience they’ll expect it. You don’t get anything in life for free, right? Everyone I talked to was happy to help practice Spanish with me, teaching me about the Argentinian Spanish slang that I didn’t get from studying Mexican Spanish, and the ways in which Spanish from Spain differs in a few key ways (vosotros, for example). But all of them, through an unspoken but very real understanding, expected to switch to English from time to time so that they could learn from me. I didn’t see it as a downside at all, though. It was a beautiful thing.

the bottom line

Italki gets left out of the language-learning discussion often; I’m guessing because italki’s user base leans heavily international across many countries, rather than being clustered among users of just a few Western countries. It’s a shame, because it is a very unique offering in a landscape of apps all trying to teach you language via call-and-response.

More than any of the other language-learning apps, italki felt the most interactive because I was both student and teacher. It wasn’t just fun to learn from real human beings the kind of slang the stuffy formal lessons never taught me; it was also fun to explain American idioms and how we actually do sometimes informally drop the subject from sentences. Example: “Going to the store,” instead “I’m going to the store.”

I wouldn’t rely on italki to get me into a language from scratch, nor as the only tool in my language-learning toolbox. But it brings a unique set of advantages in its real-time, real-people interactions that no other app I’ve used can claim.