Choosing a zoom Spanish conversation provider

December 7, 2021 5:34 PM

I keep almost doing one of those things where you pay a native speaker to teach or do conversation with you (my grammar's ok so I mostly just want conversation) but never quite pulling the trigger. I looked again recently and there are LOTS of them. Is there a good way to choose from among them? (And, incidentally, is it reasonable to expect conversation rather than grammar lessons? It seems actually harder for the provider to come up with things to talk about than to go through grammar lessons.)
posted by less-of-course to Education (7 answers total)

This is a sort of random suggestion, but could you hire someone who knows something about a second subject you're also interested in learning about (knitting, web design, cooking, whatever) and have some part of the chatting be about that?

So, like they could teach you one recipe or whatever and you could talk while you bake. So you could talk about the recipe, about shopping for ingredients, about who you might have over to eat, etc.
posted by mercredi at 6:36 PM on December 7, 2021 [5 favorites]

Best answer: I've been doing this throughout the whole pandemic and my Spanish has really blossomed (from "I think I'm going to die if I have to finish this sentence" level to "I can chat in a questionably grammatical way about pretty much anything and I enjoy myself doing it").

Most/all teachers are happy to just do conversation so it's a question of finding someone you like to talk to. Here are four teachers who I think are excellent conversationalists, all on the website "italki":

Miguel
Jaime
Mayra
Valeria

You can also try the website superprof.mx if you wanted to do what mercredi is suggesting (i.e. get someone to give you dance or cooking lessons in Spanish). That requires more legwork but it can be fun -- I took a dance fitness class on Zoom that was based in Mexico City for a while.
posted by hungrytiger at 7:18 PM on December 7, 2021 [9 favorites]

It is absolutely fine to seek conversation rather than grammar lessons - conversation is a fundamental part of ESL teaching. If it's hard for someone to come up with topics to converse about, could you send them a few news articles before a session and use those as a discussion starter?
posted by dg at 7:34 PM on December 7, 2021 [3 favorites]

After months of thinking about doing this, I finally made it happen last week and though I've only had one Zoom session with them, I recommend Spanish With Tutors, a group of instructors based in Colombia, very highly. I was really impressed with the amount of preparation the instructor put into our hour--especially since the first meeting is free!

I'm advanced enough to have earned a "bilingual staff" certification at work by passing an hour-long comprehension and translation test administered by a native speaker, so I don't need or want to spend an hour in grammar class. At the same time, I'm nowhere near truly fluent; I'm largely self-taught so there are big, weirdly unpredictable gaps in my knowledge that a structured class wouldn't be a good place to address.

When I signed up I mentioned all this, along with a few of my interests, and my first hour was completely, perfectly tailored to exactly what I wanted to focus on and totally avoided any kind of grammar school classroom vibe. We basically just chatted about poetry and when I said something incorrect the instructor made a discreet note and we talked about it during a natural lull in the conversation. She was easy to talk to and her accent was very neutral so even via Zoom I had no trouble understanding her. Oh, and the price is an obscenely low $22 for an hour.

I have my next Zoom session tomorrow and I'm really looking forward to it.
posted by jesourie at 9:22 PM on December 7, 2021 [1 favorite]

I had a very positive experience learning to speak Spanish with Helena. Lessons were conversation based, in that we would talk freely for most of the hour and at the end she would review points of grammar that came up. I'm sure she would be able to customize her approach according to your preferences. She's an extremely personable and excellent teacher.

Memail me if you need more contact info than you are getting through linkedin.
posted by bertran at 11:52 PM on December 7, 2021 [1 favorite]

Just in case this is an option you haven’t considered, English–Spanish should be a reasonably easy language pair to find a tandem partner for. This is a strongly conversation-based method (though in principle, it can be whatever you want it to be).
posted by wachhundfisch at 12:56 AM on December 8, 2021 [1 favorite]

iTalki lets you search for teachers by keyword, and most of the teachers put some of their hobbies, interests, and work experience in their profile. So you can look for people who share interests with you. (Literature, photography, architecture, cualquier cosa. Try searching both the Spanish and English versions of the keyword, too.)

I chose two Latin American countries that I'd like to visit in the future, and watched a lot of the introductory videos from teachers from those areas. I chose two teachers that seemed like good matches, and they were both very charming conversationalists. I'm still having lessons with both of them, a few years later.
posted by umber vowel at 7:57 PM on December 8, 2021