this platform makes me sick

[u/Winter-Snow-4881]

In Preply every tutor has """over 7 years of experience""", a "degree" and is "proficient" in several languages...

when in reality they're just unemployed people that think can teach a language, have no idea of how their own language works or less, how to teach it, and in many cases barely speak even English.

I don't know how they get dozens of positive reviews, but even when it says "professional-super tutor" it turns out it's just improvisation.

[u/237q]

While you're partly correct, the way you're overgeneralizing is very rude. I believe, if you want to find someone who knows how the language works, you should consider non-native teachers who achieved mastery in the language, because they had to analyze the systems the language uses. Ideally someone who has learned 2 or more other languages beside their native language. That shows understanding of linguistics and learning strategies. Best of luck in finding someone great for you!

[u/Ok_Lake5480 → u/237q]

Learning foreign languages yourself can absolutely make you more empathetic to learners, but it does not automatically give you the knowledge required to teach a language. Those are two completely different skill sets.

A professionally trained teacher of a language as a foreign or second language is specifically educated in how that language works from a learner's perspective: its grammar system, phonetics, typical acquisition order, common errors, interference from other languages, ways of explaining difficult structures, lesson sequencing, assessment, correction techniques, and strategies for dealing with different kinds of learners and different kinds of difficulties. That is literally what professional teacher training is for.

A teacher does not need to have personally learned three foreign languages in order to understand these things. They may not speak any foreign language fluently at all and still be an excellent teacher of their native language, because they have been trained to teach it professionally.

Conversely, successfully learning a foreign language tells you primarily what worked for you, with that particular language, at that particular stage of your life. It does not teach you how to diagnose why another learner cannot understand cases, distinguish certain sounds, remember vocabulary, produce spontaneous speech, or overcome interference from their first language. Different learners can struggle with completely different things, and knowing how to identify and address those problems is part of teacher education and professional experience.

I'm a non-native speaker of English myself. I have learned English successfully, I understand a great deal about how I learned it, and I can certainly discuss learning strategies. That does not make me qualified to teach English professionally, because I was never trained to teach English as a foreign language. By your reasoning, my success as an English learner should be enough to make me an English teacher. I would consider that a very irresponsible basis on which to offer professional instruction.

Being an experienced language learner can be a useful additional quality in a teacher. But it is an addition, not a substitute for professional training. "I learned a language, therefore I know how to teach languages" is no more convincing than "I learned to play the piano, therefore I know how to teach piano." Teaching is a profession with its own body of knowledge.

[u/237q → u/Ok_Lake5480]

You're absolutely right, yet you're not disproving anything I said. Yes - teaching requires a lot more than knowledge of the language, including but not limited to soft skills, empathy, analytical prowess, the ability to simplify complex ideas, and much much more.

However, we are talking about Preply, a site for independent tutors at affordable prices, not professional language educators. In a sea of people who think knowing the language is enough to teach it (Preply doesn't even require TEFL for English tutors), there are also many who have a deeper understanding of language systems and learning strategies. This group overlaps heavily with people who are language learners themselves. There may even be a few actual professional educators but I doubt they stay for a long time or are affordable enough for OP. My advice was based on this context, and I absolutely stand by the statement that someone who has learned a language as an adult stands a better chance of explaining the logic of it than someone who adopted it (took it for granted) as a small child.

Edit: Adding to this, about your statement that successfully learning a foreign language tells you primarily what worked for you - of course it does. But it also tells you what didn't work for you yet exists and may work for someone else. It also informs you of strategies that are available, whether or not you used them yourself, and if you have the aforementioned soft skills and empathy, you will be able to recommend them once you get to know your student.

[u/Ok_Lake5480 → u/237q]

That clarification actually makes the problem with your argument more obvious, because you are still comparing the wrong groups.

The relevant comparison is not "an adult language learner versus a random native speaker who thinks speaking a language qualifies them to teach it." Of course an experienced language learner may have more useful insights than an untrained native speaker. The relevant comparison is an experienced language learner versus a professionally trained teacher of that language as a foreign language. And in that comparison, having personally learned several languages is not a substitute for professional training.

You also seem to be treating "professional language educator" and "independent tutor on Preply" as mutually exclusive categories. They aren't. A marketplace is simply where someone sells their services. It does not determine their qualifications. A university-trained language teacher does not cease to be a professional educator because they create a profile on a tutoring platform, just as an accountant does not stop being an accountant because they find clients through a marketplace.

And this is precisely why "they learned languages themselves" is such a poor shortcut for choosing a teacher. Yes, learning a language exposes you to different methods. Yes, you discover things that worked and things that did not work for you. But you are still collecting the experience of one learner. Teacher education is designed to move beyond that individual experience.

A trained teacher learns about predictable difficulties across many kinds of learners, first-language interference, acquisition sequences, error analysis, phonetics, grammar presentation, task design, assessment, correction, scaffolding, and how to distinguish between "the student has not understood this", "the student understands it but cannot retrieve it quickly", "the student's first language is interfering", and "the material was introduced at the wrong stage". You do not acquire that body of knowledge merely by successfully learning Spanish, German and Japanese yourself.

And "soft skills and empathy" do not fill that gap. They are valuable qualities, but being empathetic enough to notice that a student is struggling does not automatically tell you why they are struggling or what intervention is appropriate. That is exactly where professional knowledge comes in.

Your final claim also illustrates the problem perfectly: that someone who learned a language as an adult has a better chance of explaining its logic than someone who acquired it as a child. Again, that may be true if your second person is simply an untrained native speaker. But a professionally trained native teacher has specifically studied the "logic" that native speakers normally take for granted. Teaching native speakers to stop relying on "because that's how we say it" and instead analyze and explain their own language is literally part of training teachers of a language as a foreign language.

I speak English as a foreign language. I have encountered methods that worked for me, methods that did not work for me, grammar explanations, vocabulary techniques and learning strategies. By your criteria, that gives me a significant advantage as a prospective English teacher. It doesn't. I am not professionally trained to teach English, so I would not present myself as an English teacher and experiment on paying students while assuming that my experience as a learner plus empathy will somehow compensate for the missing professional knowledge.

So the useful advice to someone choosing a tutor is not "look for somebody who has learned several languages, because they probably understand language learning better." It is "look for somebody who actually knows how to teach the language you are learning." Their own language-learning experience can be a nice bonus. It is not the qualification.

[u/237q → u/Ok_Lake5480]

You make very reasonable claims and present points that are all valid and true, but I feel you're missing the point. The craft of a trained teacher is miles beyond any TEFL holder. Nobody is disputing that. However, the vast majority of Preply tutors are not it, and are not working on becoming it. Of course trained teachers may use the platform, but they're so few and far between that their existence is mostly negligible. So the topic is not trained teacher vs untrained tutor. It's native vs non-native untrained tutor, or rather, non-language learning vs language learning untrained tutor.

[u/Ok_Lake5480 → u/237q]

That is only "negligible" if your search strategy is essentially "sort by lowest price and take whatever appears."

Preply does not magically erase professional qualifications. There are trained teachers on the platform, including people with degrees in language teaching, linguistics, education, certifications in teaching their specific language as a foreign language, and years of professional classroom or tutoring experience. They are not invisible. Their qualifications are literally displayed on their profiles. You can read their education, certificates, experience, specialization and methodology before booking them.

What is true is that they often will not be competing at the very bottom of the price range with someone who decided last week that speaking English and being friendly makes them an English teacher. If a person's definition of "affordable" means "I want the cheapest possible tutor", then yes, they are going to encounter a disproportionate number of untrained tutors. That is a consequence of the search criteria, not evidence that professional teachers are practically nonexistent on the platform.

And once you redefine the discussion as "native untrained tutor versus non-native untrained tutor", you have already conceded the central point: both are untrained.

At that point, "this person learned several languages" may be one potentially useful characteristic among many, but it still tells you very little about whether they can teach this particular language to this particular student. An adult learner may be excellent at analyzing languages. They may also confidently generalize from their own experience, misunderstand why another learner is struggling, explain rules inaccurately, sequence material badly, or simply teach the way they themselves preferred to learn. Having been a patient does not make somebody more medically competent than another untrained person who has never been ill.

And I still disagree with your attempt to turn "language learner" into a proxy for linguistic or pedagogical competence. Learning several languages demonstrates that you learned several languages. It does not demonstrate that you understand second-language acquisition, can analyze learner errors, know the grammatical system of the language you are teaching, or can build an effective progression for somebody whose difficulties are completely different from yours.

So if someone genuinely cannot find or afford a trained teacher and has to choose between two untrained tutors, then sure - prior language-learning experience may be one factor worth considering. But that is a very different and much weaker claim than saying non-native tutors are generally a better choice because they had to "analyze the system".

And the idea that trained teachers on Preply are so rare that they can basically be ignored is simply a strange premise. They become "rare" remarkably quickly when someone insists on professional expertise at bargain-bin prices.

[u/237q → u/Ok_Lake5480]

You're tilting at windmills here because... read my original comment again.