Top 6 Websites to Find Japanese Tutors in 2022|Online & Near Me

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As a language learning addict, I have tried quite a few tutoring websites, including Italki, Preply, Verbling, AmazingTalker, and HeyTutor, hoping to find my ideal tutors. After spending much time experimenting with different platforms, I am confident to say that I can share a few pros and cons on each of them with you. Take a quick 5-10 minutes to reading this article and you can expect to save up to weeks trying to them out yourself.
Japanese tutor

Finding a Japanese Tutor – Near Me or Online?

Before starting to look for a Japanese tutor, you might come upon a choice between an in-person tutor and an online tutor. Besides the old fashioned face to face tutoring,  online tutoring have also become increasing popular due to the fact that it is more convenient and often costs less. So, which one should you go for? What are the pros and cons?

 

Japanese tutor near me – pros and cons

Hiring an in-person tutor remains a common choice for language learners. Many prefer it because of the interactions you are able to have with a real person instead of talking to a computer screen. Face to face tutoring also lets you have easier and more instant feedbacks on your work or output. However, it is limited to your location and requires traveling time for the tutor and you. It also usually cost more than an online session and it less flexible.

Pros:

  • More interactions in class
  • Better feedback on your works
  • No connection or network issues

Cons:

  • Less flexible schedule
  • Requires travel
  • Limited to your location
  • Often cost more

 

Japanese tutor online – pros and cons

Study with a Japanese tutor online is much more convenient, in many people’s opinion. There is no need to travel far to get Japanese lessons. Also, you are not limited to your country or location and can find high-quality or native teachers far more easier. Not to mention the price is often cheaper than in-person tutoring. However, it could get boring talking into a microphone and therefore requires more concentration. You might also have a bad learning experience if the internet connection is not stable.

Pros:

  • Flexible schedule
  • No need to travel
  • Easier to find native tutors
  • Not limited to the tutor pool near you
  • Rates are often cheaper

Cons:

  • Some people don’t like the lack of human interaction
  • Might get interrupted if network connection is not stable
  • Harder to concentrate

With that being said, let’s focus on some of the best platforms for you to find the perfect Japanese tutor!

 

Find Online Japanese Tutor – Italki

Italki currently has the biggest market share in the tutoring industry. Founded in 2006, Italki has established a comprehensive learning ecosystem for both tutors and students. They have the largest tutor base among all platforms, an intuitive user interface, and an active community for students to discuss their problems. Italki doesn’t provide their own video chat system and the classes are conducted with Skype.
 
 

What is special about Italki?

So, what makes Italki special? Italki separates its teachers into two categories, one is professional teachers while the other one is community tutors. Professional teachers are guaranteed to have certifications and professional experience but comes with a higher price, while community tutors are just native speakers or advanced learners who can help you practice speaking with lower prices. You can often find decent community tutors to help you learn if you look hard enough.
 

Prices from: $10

Payment options: Visa, Mastercard, Paypal, Alipay, Skrill eWallet and Bank Transfer

Flexibility of lesson plans  ★★★★★
You can add any amount of credits to your account. Then you can use your credits to buy either one or multiple lessons. Usually the more you buy, the more discounts you get (depends on the tutor).

User Experience  ★★★★
Italki has a much better user experience after its redesign, making it more elegant and more intuitive. All the functions youll need is on your dashboard and you can learn to navigate pretty easily.

Customer Support  ★★★✩✩
Theres only one support center on Italki. If you cant solve your problems by browsing the faq materials. Youll need to wait a long time before being contacted by email. 

Overall Verdict ★★★★
Great interface, good teacher quality and active community makes iTalki a great choice to get a Japanese tutor and start your language learning journey. However, slow customer support and little discount are a few of its downsides.

Get free Japanese lessons and discounts

Due to its leading position in the market, Italki barely gives any discounts. Though some teachers offer discounts if a student buys more lessons, popular teachers usually don’t provide such discounts. Teachers can decide their price and how many discounts they would like to give. 

Boost your Japanese language learning

Apart from paid lessons, Italki also provides a community where you can find language exchange partners. By picking a good partner you can get additional practices with native Japanese speakers.
What’s more, you can write essays, ask questions, and let other native Japanese speakers correct your writing or answer your questions in the community. The whole community is quite active and most posts get responses.
 
 

Find Japanese Tutors – Preply

Preply is the second-largest tutoring platform worldwide, which means they are pretty mature as well. Established in 2012, Preply has provided its service to a large number of teachers and students worldwide. They offer not only language tutors but also tutors teaching other subjects, such as computer science, music and business. Preply is home to many tutors as well, approximately 200 tutors teaches Japanese. Preply doesn’t differentiate their teachers like Italki does. However, they give teachers different tags to let students identify which teachers are popular and can be trusted. Similar to Italki, you have to use Skype to have a one-to-one lesson with your tutor.
 

 

What is special about Preply?

If you don’t know how to find the right Japanese tutor or are simply too lazy to, you can post a request and let tutors find you instead. The option to post a request is on the last page when browsing the teachers. You need to provide what subject you would like to learn, what requirements you have, and what kind of prices you would like to pay.
 

Price from: $10

Payment options: Visa, Mastercard and PayPal

Flexibility of lesson plans  ★★★✩✩
After your first free trial hour, you have to buy at least 5 hours for your next purchase. Preply offers discounts for packages of 10 and 20 hours.

User Experience  ★★★✩✩
In general, Preply offers an intuitive user interface. It’s easy to find a teacher, easy to add hours and easy to monitor all your learning progress. However its tutor pages contain quite a lot of information and can sometimes be disorienting.

Customer Support  ★★★★★
You can check the customer support at the bottom right corner. FAQs are well organized to help you book lessons with tutors. You can also find instant help by contacting online customer support. Business hours — 6 am – 11 pm on weekdays, 8 am – 6 pm on weekends.

Final verdict: ★★★✩✩

Preply is by all standards a decent platform to find a Japanese tutor. Nice interface, detailed information on tutors and great customer support. However they don’t treat their tutors very well and you can see a lot of them complaining on third-party websites.

Get free Japanese lessons and discounts

Preply offers every new user a free first lesson, so you can try at least one teacher without risking spending money at the wrong place. If you’re not satisfied with the tutor after your first trial lesson, you can book another tutor’s trial lesson right away. But if you wait for 3 weeks and do not add any tutors into your cart, you’ll get another free lesson. Usually, Preply offers a free lesson after 30 days to users who do not book any lessons when they have remaining hours with a tutor or after 20 days to a user who do not purchase any hours. Although it might be a good way to get free lessons, changing tutors constantly does not help  languages learning at all. (In fact, the cost is on the tutor and not Preply. Preply force tutors to give free trial lessons which I don’t quite agree with.)
 
Preply also has a referral system. You can give your friends your referral link and ss soon as they use the discount, they’ll get a 30% off their first payment and the same amount will be credited to your account.
 
 

Find Japanese teachers – Verbling

Verbling is almost the same size as Preply, currently they have about 150 Japanese tutors on their platform. Verbling offers “featured tutors” to let students recognize who might be more professional at a certain subject. You can also see how many students a tutor has taught on their profile. Verbling offers transparent teacher stats, including attendance rate, total lessons, and lessons per student. 
 

 

What is special about Verbling?

Unlike other platforms focusing more on matching students with tutors, Verbling offers a wide variety of useful tools for students to learn a new language. They have their own classroom so you don’t need to go to Skype to have lessons with your tutors. They also provide a workspace inside the classroom, your tutor would put all the teaching materials there for you to review easily. 
 

Price From: $6

Payment options: Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Discover, Paypal, Alipay, Wechat and many other forms (depends on country)

Flexibility of lesson plans ★★★★
Verbling offers 1, 5, 10, 20 and 50 lesson packages. You can get discounts when buying more than 5 lessons at a time, but the amount of discounts also depends on each tutor.

User Experience ★★★★★
Verblings user interface is not the most beautiful, but it offers virtual classrooms and vocabulary decks to help your Japanese language learning. We really like it since it’s quite unique among other platforms and very useful.

Customer Support ★★★★★
You can get instant help at the bottom right corner of the page. The Verbling support team usually replies within an hour. You can search for FAQs in the chat box as well.

Overall Verdict ★★★★★
Verbling is a really great website to find online tutors. Not much to complain about and it comes with many thoughtful small features to make learning a whole lot easier. However it does a poor job at marketing so the brand awareness is quite low.

Get free Japanese lessons and discounts

Verbling provides a one-third price off the first trial lesson which takes half of the normal lesson time.
 
Verbling occasionally offers some marketing activity, but not that often.
 
Sometimes they give 10% to 15% discounts and sometimes a free lesson if you buy a 20 lesson package. The discounts are quite random so you might need some luck to use them. But most of the time you can expect tutors to give 10% to 25% discounts if you buy more than 5 lessons.
 

Boost your Japanese language learning

The most appealing feature on Verbling must be the vocabulary deck. You can add any new words you don’t know to your deck and review them in your free time. The repetition system is quite like Duolingo or Quizlet. Moreover, you can explore decks created by other learners.
 
 

Find Japanese tutor online – AmazingTalker

 
AmazingTalker is a relatively new player comparing to the three companies listed above. However, they are expanding aggressively and accumulated a group of excellent tutors due to the fact that they offer tutors generous incentives. Though not having as many teachers as Italki, Preply, and Verbling. You can expect to find a decent tutor by the transparency of teachers’ educational background, work experience, and students’ comments and reviews.
Japanese tutors & teachers for private lessons

 

What is special about AmazingTalker?

The biggest difference that makes AmazingTalker stands out is that they have an impressive AI recommendation system in which you simply answer some basic requirements and get responses from tutors within a few hours. Besides, all the teachers on the platform went through a rigorous selection process and are well trained. They understand how to guide a Japanese newbie on the path, even if they don’t know a single Japanese word.
 

Price From: $5

Payment options: VISA, Mastercard and JCB

Flexibility of lesson plans  ★★★★★
You can buy 1 to 100 lessons according to your needs. AmazingTalker offers discounts for packages of 5, 10, 20 lessons. You can also discuss with your tutors to see if they offer more discounts on buying more than 20 lessons.

User Experience  ★★★★
The general user experience is really nice on AmazingTalker, easy to look for a new tutor, easy to book your first lesson and easy to navigate through the whole site. However, some users complain about not able to manage their lesson history neatly.

Customer Support  ★★★★★
The customer service support is located at the bottom right corner. You can contact the support team if you came upon any problems. The average response time on AmazingTalker is within an hour on weekdays and a few hours on weekends.

Overall Verdict ★★★★★
AmazingTalker is one of the best platforms to find and “be” a tutor. It attracts a lot of high-quality tutors by treating them nicely and generously, which makes it a lot easier to get a good tutor. Coupled with its advanced AI matching system, you are sure to find just the right tutor for yourself.

Get free Japanese lessons and discounts

AmazingTalk is giving out an incredible amount of discounts to students. You have a 5% off discount on a 5 lesson package, 10% off on a 10 lesson package, 15% off on a 20 lesson package. Check their Japanese Tutor page for more details.
 
Moreover, right after you finish your trial lesson with a tutor, you’ll get a $10 discount to buy the tutor’s lessons.The most important of all, they have crazy sales every February and August. You can expect discounts like buy one and get one free during that time.
 

Boost your Japanese language learning

Though not having a customized classroom system like Verbling, the tutors are well trained to use Zoom, a video chat app that offers better lesson experience than Skype.
 
Also, most tutors make use of Google Docs to manage all the teaching materials that students can review or complete their homework.
 
 

Find Japanese tutors near me – HeyTutor

 
HeyTutor is a platform that allows students to hire tutors near their location. They cover topics such as math, science, test preparation, social studies, and languages. The tutor finding process on HeyTutor is not that transparent. It doesn’t allow you to browse any of their tutors. Even after you fill out the requesting form, you still can’t look at tutors’ profiles. While it claims that you can get tutors’ response within 20 minutes, the actual time is far longer more than that.
 

 

What is special about HeyTutor?

They offer two different kinds of service. The one is on-demand online tutoring, in which you can enjoy lessons from the comfort of your own home. The other one is private in-person tutoring, in which you can get HeyTutor handpicked candidates, along with background checks (extra money needed). 
 

Price From: $20

Payment options: Visa, Mastercard

Flexibility of lesson plans  ★★★✩✩
You can buy 10, 20 or 30 hours of tutoring. All lessons are pre-paid with a one-time purchase. You can renew your package plan if you need more hours.

User Experience  ★★✩✩✩
The general user experience is OK. However, you only get  limited information when you are not logged in. You cant preview tutors and if you want to know more about a tutor, you have to contact the tutor.

Customer Support  ★★★
Theres not much information in the FAQs, but they offer phone customer support. Though not as convenient as online support. You can give a call to solve the problems you meet.

 
Thanks for reading this article and hope it has helped you on your path to learning Japanese. If you’d like to learn more about this language, check out our other article “I love you in Japanese” at this link. Don’t forget to make use of the discounts and tips provided above! Happy Japanese learning !
 
 

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Betty Carter
Betty Carter@bettyhot1015
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I really appreciate the fact that teachers actually took their time to understand your level and needs. Mine set up a few tailored classes after discussing with me and it was the best learning experience I've had.
Cory Nicholas
Cory Nicholas@coryn47832
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Best online tutor website I've ever used! Really great teacher quality. Simple and easy to use. Recommended to anyone who's trying to learn a new language.
Laura S.
Laura S.@lauraangel
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Found a nice teacher to help me on my Spanish lessons. I really like the fact that you can take lessons at home and schedule them according to your free time.
Kimberley
Kimberley@kimlove1314
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Went through a rather rigorous vetting process and started teaching at Amazingtalker a few months ago. It has been so rewarding to meet new students online teach at my own time and leisure.
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