Disclaimer: I’m not affiliated with the company. I’ll also refrain from sharing my referral code here.
**Promotion and signup**
Native Camp is like iTalki for Japanese people to learn English, but recently they added Japanese as a target language. I got hooked by the “unlimited lessons first month” advertisement, but it was not what I expected. More on that later.
Signup process is like any other site where you choose either email+password or gmail/social login. I was required to put in my credit card, and was reminded there will be charges after the first month. It definitely looks more on the fishy side. It declined my debit card and would only accept my credit card. I’ll report back on the cancellation process in the future. If you don’t cancel, it is $200/month.
**The Catch**
Once I got in, I clicked into the tutor list and selected a tutor. When I proceeded to booking however, it told me this booking would consume 100 coins (!) from my current 200 coins. I was confused because this was supposed to be unlimited. I went back to the signup page, and it turns out, in the description of the second numbered point of the promotion, unlimited is for “sudden lessons” only. After some googling, I found out that the teachers are who on standby could provide impromptu lessons, and the company requires newer teachers to do more sudden lessons, even though the rates are lower compared to booked lessons.
**The Good**
Back on the main page, I noticed that the tutors with a blue dot on their top left avatar means that they are available. I selected a tutor for a sudden lesson and was prompted to select the duration of the lesson, which was between 5 to 25 minutes. I chose 10 minutes and “free talk”. You can also choose textbooks provided by the site, which are mostly beginner content for now. Even “business conversation” is written with only hiragana and no kanji.
Like other sites, there are more female tutors than male tutors. Many of them say in their profile they have a Japanese teaching certificate, even though a certificate is not required to sign up to be a teacher. It could be helpful if the site could add a badge for certified teachers like iTalki, although this might make uncertified teachers less willing to work on the platform.
I’ve had three short lessons so far (free talk), and there were no problems so far. It feels like the 30 minute discounted “trial lesson” on iTalki before you decide whether you want to book an actual lesson with the tutor. Given that I’ve had pretty negative experiences on iTalki, the quality of teachers here are pretty comparable. It probably wouldn’t feel as bad when you have a bad match because you didn’t commit any money yet.
People who have a lot of free time and disposable income could probably benefit a lot from this. I tried HelloTalk VIP this year, but found it to be too chaotic. Learners had hugely varying levels, and a lot of people had bad microphones and noisy backgrounds. I’ll update this post when I’ve cancelled the free trial and have had more lessons.
by pudding321