I'm in no way affiliated with italki, but I thought some of you might like to know they are about to start another challenge. If you take 12 hours of lessons in October, you'll get $20 worth of credit. It requires a $10 pledge, which will be refunded if you succeed. As I said for the italki world cup challenge, this is money in the bank for me, because I'm already going to be taking 1 hr per day for about 30 more hours. It's part of my personal 200 hour challenge. Is anybody else up for this?
I am signed up to it for the same reason. I was already intending to clock up the hours, so the added discount is welcome. I'm not sure how it can really be called a challenge, it doesn't seem that difficult to me, apart from the expense!
If I were inclined to take German lessons, which I am not, it seems from a search on their site that most native speaker teachers charge USD$20+ per hour. So that basically amounts to getting a 7.5% discount (1/13), which to me would not be much of an incentive. However for languages spoken in poorer regions, i.e. Eastern Europe and smaller Asian countries, it seems one could get lessons for 1/2 the costs of major Euro languages, and would be getting a better deal, i.e. twice as much of a discount. Basically this is a challenge for italki's marketing department staff to see how much business they can drive to the site in October. This is like the grocery offering offering 13 six-packs of beer for the normal price of 12. At least then you could drink it at your leisure after buying it. But I could probably do 3 bears a day and get it done in October instead of my normal 1 beer with dinner or late night. After all Oktoberfest goes with learning German. Of course after enough German beer each day maybe I would feel more loquacious and be willing to do an hour of German lesson. If I fell asleep half way through would they deduct the entire hour?
Not this month. I like the italki challenges. I definitely improve during short intensive sprints. But money is tight right now, and I don't have enough credits to take me through 20 lessons in a month. Yes, it's a marketing ploy. I don't begrudge italki their marketing - they are, after all, a business. I like what they're selling, so I buy when I can! When I can't buy, then I quite happily use their very good free resources.
I don't begrudge a company making money off of language learning if they provide something worthwhile at a reasonable price, nor marketing for same. But what I dislike is any type of marketing that acts as if the company is doing you a big favor, when in reality they are only doing you a small or no favor, but getting the customers to do a big one for them. If italki offered customers the same 7.5% discount in exchange for an up front deposit to be released at the end, but with better terms of use like one had a year to purchase all the lessons instead of having to cram them all in one month, then though I would still regard it as a small discount, it would be money in the bank for customers like BD who were going to being buying those lessons anyway. Small discount + severe time limit + not particularly cheap anyway = not a good deal to me, with the caveat again that for some countries/languages where the going rate is 1/2 of that of western Europe, then it might be an OK deal. A different way of putting the offer so that it was more flexible would be to sell 13 lessons for the price of 12, provided one paid up front and then could be used anytime in the next year or so. That would probably get regular customers to consider it more. Another question I have about this challenge is whether one is obligated to use the same tutor for all the lessons? It would suck if you later found you didn't like a tutor but were obligated to stay with them for the duration.
Tutors have the option of offering packages of 5 or 10 sessions for a discounted price. One of my tutors charges 14 dollars an hour, or if you buy a 10-session package, you pay the equivalent of 12.5 dollars an hour. Offering packages is at the tutor's discretion. For italki challenges, you can work with as many tutors - and languages - as you want. During the last challenge, I worked with five tutors in two languages. I've completed two italki challenges since I first registered in July of last year. Both were well worth the time and money. (Assuming, of course, that you have money to devote to language learning, which obviously depends on each person's financial situation.)
Nope on 7 at the minute, it would have been 8 if I hadn't cancelled one due to the dreaded man flu. Should be complete next Tuesday morning!