$45,000 in 2.5 Years as an Unqualified Language Teacher

Zee ChewiTalki Community Tutor $40 per hour Published February 15, 2024 by Fardeen KhanReviewed and edited by Niall Doherty

In a recent video, Zee Chew talks about how much money she’s earned as a community tutor on iTalki …

iTalki is a language learning marketplace, where learners can hire professional teachers or community tutors.

As a community tutor, like Zee, you don’t need to have any formal teaching qualifications

Check out Zee’s profile on iTalki and you can see that she teaches Chinese (Mandarin) and English. The vast majority of her students seem to be Mandarin speakers who want to learn English

Zee charges about $20 per 30-minute lesson.

She says in the video…

In total, I made about $45,000 [in 2.5 years] after the 15% commission cut, which, in my opinion, is still quite a decent amount of money…

Thanks to the consistent extra cash coming in, I was able to live a digital nomad lifestyle and travel across Europe back in 2022.

How she got started back in 2021…

I was feeling miserable and lost after investing six months in a [job] interview which I ultimately failed. It took me six months just to fail that interview.

At that time, I just wanted to do something productive, and I knew that I had to make money. I couldn’t just stay at home doing nothing.

So…

I started googling how to make money online, and that’s when I stumbled upon iTalki and Preply [another language learning marketplace]….

After assessing my own skill sets and checking the requirements from the platforms, I signed up immediately and began my tutoring journey as an online figure without any experience.

If you’re eager to try iTalki yourself, Zee offers some tips in the video

However, she doesn’t mention anything about pricing, and I suspect a big part in her success was starting out with low prices and raising them over time as she gained positive reviews on the platform.

She does say that her total earnings (before fees) = $50,000 after 2500 hours of tutoring, which works out to an average of $20/hour.

So she probably started out charging closer to $10/hour on iTalki.

Nowadays she’s effectively charging $40/hour, but it clearly took a lot of time and effort for her to get to that level

Use the search function on iTalki to get a sense of how much different community tutors charge. You can filter by language, type of teacher, time of day, etc.

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