Are you looking for a convenient way to practice spoken Chinese and improve your level quickly? I am a very friendly ,enthusiastic

and patient ,native Chinese with perfect Mandarin. We can have a talk with skype online anytime you want.
Price :$10 per hour . if you want ,please contact me via email :alvgewan@hotmail.com. I will write back in 24 hours.

We've come up in the world! We are getting spam now!

On a side note: this actually raises an interesting idea. A user submitted listing of different 1 on 1 Skype teachers and or schools. You could also list face to face ones, but given that Skritter users are scattered all over the world....

Yes, you can always go to some strange forum and look for a teacher. I personally like the freedom of a one on one class outside of the school environment. I doubt a Skype school would be happy with their teachers talking to me about some of the topics that come up with my teachers. (Nothing obscene.) This also means that all of my tuition is going to the teacher, not some administrative overhead. I am sure many people on here know good teachers. Sometimes, your schedule has a major change and you can't use that teacher anymore. The teacher is good, but you have to change.

A user submitted list of teachers and their basic info might help people find good teachers. You could list who recommended them to keep the poster honest. You could list what type of language they offer, Mainland, Taiwan, or Japanese. You could even list an evaluation of their strengths and weaknesses. There are a lot of pathetic teachers out there with students while many good ones sit on their thumbs between students. If I want to try a Taiwanese teacher for a while, this would be a source. If I wanted to try Japanese for a while, before taking the plunge and going to Japan, this would be a potential source.

Do other people think this idea has validity, or is it just a random brain fart which I should have kept to myself? Is it something people would actually use? I doubt coding one or two extra web pages would be a strain for the Skritter Gods, but there is the question of whether this would be of use.

We get a bunch of spam, but usually you don't see it. Since you've brought up the issue of finding online Chinese teachers, we'll keep the thread around. west316, apart from the administrative overhead (which is not too high), ChineseTeachers.com is what you want. Great people behind it, 200 teachers, insanely flexible. I would definitely give that a try.

I love how the price for one hour is higher than one month of Skritter.

Well, it is one-on-one tutoring with a professional, at your convenience. If you compare it to the price of a college Chinese class, it's a steal.

Hey nick,

can we set aside part of the forum for discussion and the separate section for spam and other commercial related posts?

would hate to see the cosy forum culture altered by overly zealous commercial postings. on the other hand there may be some members of the community who actually are looking for services advertised, so splitting makes a good compromise.

I'd rather not have any overly commercial posts at all. Doesn't seem like it would add all that much value to me.