What is italki?
italki is a marketplace for live language lessons. Teachers set their own prices and schedules; you book single lessons or packages and meet in italki’s classroom or on another video tool. Community tutors are native speakers without formal teaching qualifications; professional teachers have them.
italki itself provides no fixed curriculum. An optional italki Plus subscription adds AI lesson summaries, corrections and flashcards.
What italki does well
Nothing replaces a person listening to your Mandarin and correcting your tones in real time. italki makes that accessible from a few dollars per lesson, with cheap trial lessons to find a teacher you like.
Where italki falls short
Quality depends entirely on your teacher, and prices have crept up over the years. Most importantly, an hour or two of lessons per week is not enough to learn thousands of words — you need daily self-study in between.
How MandarinChineseSystem.com fits in
MandarinChineseSystem.com is designed for that daily self-study: HSK 1–6 word lists, flashcards, quizzes, FSRS-based Interval Study, character writing practice and 240 graded articles with audio and literal translations.
Teachers can create a free teacher account, share a class code and see each student’s deck, streak, reviews, accuracy and articles read — read-only, and always under the student’s control. That makes it easy for your italki teacher to set homework and check it.
The verdict: which should you choose?
Both. Use italki for speaking and feedback, and MandarinChineseSystem.com for vocabulary, characters and reading every day — and invite your teacher to follow your progress.