In addition to my -- all too infrequent -- Skrittering, I've been taking lessons using Skype with a school in Beijing called That's Mandarin. The price seems reasonable ($12/hr US) and the teachers have generally been good. They provide notes and mp3s after each lesson and try to avoid using any English. That said, the school is by no means perfect. I've stuck with it in part just out of inertia, but now it is time to buy another block of lessons. Any other online options people can personally recommend? I've looked some at the Chinese Teachers site, but I haven't heard any direct testimonials. Any reviews (and price disclosures) would be much appreciated.

I would personally find a teacher you're happy with, then when the contract ends ask her about lessons outside of the company itself. It seems quite a lot are willing, especially since they are usually paid pittance, with the company itself taking most of the cut.

Out of that $12 your teacher, in my experience, is probably getting $1.50.

It really is very easy to try out several teachers quickly on the chineseteachers.com site, and you probably don't have to spend much at all to get a feel for it. I think the teachers are paid well there, too, although I don't have a number.

Chineseteachers.com has 12 dollars an hour as there price for there cheapest teacher. Thats about 75 RMB and hour. Seems a little expensive. For those of us who live in China, I don't think we would ever pay so much for face to face lessons. I wonder if there is a cheaper alternative.

And I read somewhere a suggestion about making this forum into a "proper" forum. I am all for that. It would let me edit my "there" in the above comment, navigate threads better, search better, and material would be better organized!

An interesting idea would be to set up a teacher-student match making site where language teachers can give skype lessons and be rated by their students. A match.com meets ratemyprofessors.com

My girlfriend was teaching at a school who charged 250RMB an hour and gave her 35. Now she teaches privately for 50. Clearly, if the middle man can be cut out, both parties benefit.

Hi Quimby,

you could actually post a message on the forum of thebeijinger.com. Lot of private tutors advertise their services there.

I have tried various tutors in the past and I must say that so far I liked the concepts applied by That's Mandarin best when I took a test lesson. If you stick to a specific book or you are advanced enough that you do not need a red thread they mostly will do fine. If you expect any learning strategy or the like you will often be lost with those tutors in my experience.

The price of That's Mandarin is quite high though, so I resolved to getting 1:1 lessons for 65RMB at CLE now. Teachers quality varies and service is flexible, definitely above the private tutor level.
CLE has been judged one of the better schools in BJ according to my research.

They also have an online program (chinaledu.com) 100-72RMB per class depending on package, but I am not familiar with details.

Best regards,
Alex

Has anybody tried Chinese Pod's Teacher Courses? It's a new initiative of theirs where they build a level-appropriate curriculum by stringing together a set of lessons from their archives which are selected to be progressive in building up skills. Its a rather different approach from their founding "top down" approach, which is more communication based. One implication is that the lessons were not originally written to teach certain grammatic concepts sequentially. I wonder if the courses would be significantly better than just letting me pick the lessons based on interest and need. I also wonder if they are worth the price, which is quite a bit more than what I was paying before for Chinese Pod's premium service with 10 minutes of Skype teacher time per week.

Thomas. Your idea is just a freaking good idea. I used to work as a programmer two years ago and I haven't written a line of code since I changed my major to chinese. However, I have decided to attempt to make that website you're talking about.

Repeat: this is an attempt. I'm downloading my kubuntu, php IDE and all my tools and will start...

Thanks man.

Cool, are you thinking of making it ad based or will teachers have to pay to be listed? Are you going for several languages at once or will you just start with Chinese?

Any language. I'm not sure, I'm not keen about ad based stuff, but maybe?

The site will be available in different languages. Either students or teachers will have to pay a small fee .. and perhaps free during first few weeks? This may take some time as I haven't programmed in a long time, but it sounds so doable and nothing out there is like that, i'll give it a try!

Feature will also include penpal matching, like mylanguageexchangebuddy.com which is horribly programmed but incredibly used.

Oh that website was: mylanguageexchange.com
It literally is horribly coded... but I made awesome friends there.

@helixness Great! One suggestion: Let people rate teachers using different dimensions (strict, friendly, knowledgeable, fun, etc.) as some people are looking for different things. You will also have a conflict if teachers pay for listings and expect to automatically get good ratings.

Thanks for the insight. I haven't gotten linux etc installed yet and have to review for midterms. This will most likely take a few weeks but if I can catch up with the latest updates in PHP I will get it done pretty quickly, it is way simpler than the last project I worked on as chief programmer.

Anyhow, when ready, I will probably ask some of you guys to help me brainstorm if that's fine :)

Good luck on your idea! I'd recommend reading a bunch of these essays if you haven't already:
http://paulgraham.com/articles.html

@helixness, 加油!

@nick - some fantastic essays there. I'm especially intrigued by the one regarding angel investing.

chineseteachers.com is good - excellent variety of teachers based all over the world, almost all of them very professional and with more interesting backgrounds than most online schools. Not the cheapest, but good value and more convenient and flexible than most of the online schools.

As well as good podcasts, imandarinpod do classes. I took classes with one of their teachers while preparing for HSK and was impressed by her professionalism. I sent photos of my hand-written essays and we went through them together once a week and discussed errors and related topics.

For relatively cheap online classes, www.chinesetutor.net provided a good range of teachers. They didn't all have perfectly standard putonghua, but that can be a good thing, listening to different accents. Also a relatively wide variety of backgrounds to their teachers, so not just the fresh out of 对外汉语 college students you get with www.echineselearning.com or other big Chinese-run online schools. Those can be good incidentally, but tend to be a little more expensive than the more innovative schools.

Pricing details for Chinese Teachers are available at:

http://www.chineseteachers.com/Our-pricing-plans-to-learn-Chinese

They have a deal until the end of the month which might be worthwhile if you want to get a block of lessons, but I've always just had individual classes with them; I used it for conversation practice so tried as many different teachers as I could. Was particularly impressed with a lady who'd part done a PhD in Chinese in Beijing University (I think) who was very enthusiastic about interpreting Chinese poetry and helped me with reading old Chinese dictionaries, and another lady now based in the US who had interesting stories to tell about how her family had moved around the world after 1948. She'd been on BBC Radio 4 in the UK apparently.

Incidentally has anyone tried paying people within China from outside of China for classes, except via one of these schools? I arrange classes with a teacher in Spain, and can send money via wire transfer relatively easily, but would like to take classes with mainlanders as well, ideally without a middleman. What's the best way to transfer money directly?

It looks like paypal might be a good option. They cooperate with a few big Chinese banks, not sure to what extent.

Right now I'm doing some trial lessons with teachers advertising on tealit.com. Tealit is a phenomenal resource for expats in Taiwan - so far I've successfully found an apartment, a language exchange partner, and surfing info.