Whoa! Unbelievable! :O I'm sure iTalki will quickly take action once the inappropriate user is reported. Especially if there are multiple teacher reporting. It's probably best if both teachers report this separately and submit their respective chat messages for evidence. Having stuff like this going around will damage the whole community for everyone!

I like the idea and tried it once. As a student I think it's great for me if I find that I have time in my schedule for having a quick lesson and I love the idea of being able to just go and have one right away. I use iTalki for free talk lessons and don't expect any pre-made lesson plans, so I think the instant lessons would be a great way to chat with new people and get exposure to different accents in addition to my regular teachers, However there are two serious flaws in the current functionality that completely kill all it's usefulness. One, it only supports trial lessons, and I don't know if you can get more of those once you have used up your three trial lessons. This is the most serious problem and it won't offer any value before it can be used for regular lessons. Two, it forces you to use the iTalki classroom, which is just horrible. I have now tried to use it twice with different browsers and it just doesn't work. First time there was no sound and the second time it distorted the sound so that the teacher sounded like a broken record. This is less problematic and more of a nuisance as the lesson tool can be agreed on with the teacher separately through a text chat after scheduling the lesson, but it would be a lot easier if you could just pick the tool to be used right away as you can with regular lessons.

Is this situation with a tutor on iTalki or a regular person you meet somewhere? In both cases I think the best would be to ask if they can slow down and speak simpler. In the latter case the point likely isn't in improving your language skills, so effective communication is paramount. It isn't effective if you aren't essentially understanding them (50-60% is so low that you might feel that you're understanding them, but you're missing huge parts and making a lot of incorrect assumptions). In the latter, I would actually quite likely just pretend that I understand. I usually record my lessons (with permission) and I'll edit the recording later so that I can listen to the tutor's part it over and over again. For me this has tremendously helped my listening comprehension and I've been able to raise it from about 70% with any given tutor to around 90-95%. I find that pretending to understand and waiting for cues that can get you back on track is also a quite a normal part of learning a language at a certain level. You can't communicate if the other person has to struggle too much to speak at your level. The trick is to notice where you must get the right information and what can be let slide. I someone says to you "let's go grab a couple of cups of coffee tomorrow at 2 pm, you'll be fine even if you don't exactly know what "grab", "couple", or "cups" means if you just can understand that they are suggesting some activity involving coffee tomorrow at 2 pm, but you'll want to get the time right. I think being able to cope with this type of ambiguity is what sets a successful language learner apart form someone who is too perfectionist and finds it hard to function, if they don't understand each and every word.

Hi, from a student point of view, I like the idea but not that it is only for the trial lessons.. I have two trial lessons left and have been thinking about trying the instant tutoring out, but once I run out of the trial lessons, how do I get more?

Hi, I noticed the instant lessons are back but they are only for the trial lessons.. Does anyone know when they are going to be for normal lessons and if not, then how to get more trial lessons to use for the instant lessons?