There are about a billion native Chinese speakers in this world, however, at this moment, 0 (zero) of them are tutoring on LingQ. How can that be? How can so many people overlook this site? Please do more promotions towards the Chinese. Run some ads. Do something. Maybe Steve could run for Prime Minister of Canada or something. Chinese-speaking non-Chinese political candidates always get a lot of attention. That would really help to get LingQ known. Especially to the Chinese speakers.
What exactly do you mean, Keith? Because I ran a little search on Chinese tutors, having the “active tutor” box checked, it reflected some results. Perhaps there aren’t enough Chinese studiers to make use of them. If you mean the Chinese tutor forum and Chinese open forums are kind of being dead, then I can see that. However, whenever a question is asked there, I believe a reply was made in a fairly timely manner.
We would love to have more Chinese speaking members and tutors. I am trying. I will host a Chinese language hangout on google+ tomorrow. go to the LingQ page at google+ for details.
It costs $5 to have a 15 minute conversation on LingQ. As I understand it, there are lots of sites where you can get a Chinese tutor for much less than that. It might be difficult to convince people to pay more to have their lessons through LingQ.
This is true but not so relevant to this discussion Bortrun. The problem here is that we have no one offering Chinese discussions. I believe we have people willing to pay the points for the discussion, but no one providing the service, for which they, in turn, would earn points.
This is also the case in Korean, where I would happily pay for a Korean tutor, but there are none. I earn plenty of points from my own tutoring, and from my referrals. Many people at LingQ earn points, in a variety of ways, and want to spend them.
If there really are people on LingQ willing to pay points for Chinese conversations, it should be relatively easy to find someone in China to take them. What about just e-mailing Chinese language schools? Surely there must be a teacher in one school who’d be interested in some extra money. But they’re not going to stick around if no one signs up.
Why not just hire a Chinese tutor to be available at certain key times for a month or something and see if people sign up for lessons? Salaries are low in China - it shouldn’t cost too much to do that. If people actually sign up, the tutor could continue in the normal way.
As I’ve done a fair amount of tutoring and writing correcting on LingQ, I have some general thoughts on the topic, but I guess I’ll save them for another thread.
Yes it is a difficult chicken and egg situation. Some of our tutors are quite successful at building a base of regular learners. We are also looking at things that we can do to increase the teaching-learning interchange between our members. Stay tuned.
I suppose you were hoping that a Chinese person studying at LingQ would step up and become the main Chinese tutor/content provider. And if you get enough Chinese learners then I guess that will eventually happen - and it’s probably the best background for a LingQ tutor to have. I haven’t looked into the Chinese library at all, but I’m still considering a move to Taiwan, so it’s something that may become relevant to me relatively shortly!
I am Vito from shangh, china.i wil be free to talk in Chinese or english
actually,we have plenty of Chinese speaker in our community,i prefer to hold some conversation in Chinese.
my Skype id is merlinocean.I’m living in Osaka,and wanna improve my English.