Greek Tutors: How to Find One (and How Much to Pay)

Where to find a Greek tutor online

Three platforms dominate online Greek tutoring, and each has a slightly different flavour.

• italki (italki.com/en/teachers/greek) is the biggest marketplace for language tutors and has the widest choice of native Greek teachers. You can filter by price, availability, teacher vs community tutor, and whether they speak your language. Rates for community tutors start around £8 an hour; qualified teachers usually sit at £15 to £25.
• Preply (preply.com/en/online/greek-tutors) works similarly but pushes weekly-subscription bundles. Handy if you know you want a regular slot; slightly less flexible if you want to trial multiple tutors.
• Verbling is smaller but has a heavier vetting process, so the average tutor quality tends to be higher. Rates are usually £18 to £30 an hour.

In-person tutors still exist through local Greek community centres and university language departments (SOAS in London, King's College, and most Greek Orthodox churches keep a list). Expect £30 to £50 an hour for private in-person tuition in most UK cities.

What to look for in a first tutor

Not every native speaker is a good teacher. When you're scanning profiles, watch for a few practical signals.

• A short intro video where they speak slowly enough that a beginner can follow. If their intro video is too fast for you now, their lesson will be too.
• Explicit beginner experience. 'Teaches all levels' often means 'used to intermediate students and impatient with A1s'. Look for teachers who mention teaching absolute beginners or the alphabet.
• Reviews from students at your level. A tutor with 200 five-star reviews from advanced learners tells you less than one with 20 five-star reviews from beginners.
• A shared working language. For your first 20 lessons you probably want a tutor who can explain grammar in English (or another language you speak well). Full-immersion Greek-only teaching is powerful, but usually not from lesson one.

Book a 30-minute trial with two or three tutors before committing. Chemistry matters more than credentials at this level.

What a good first lesson looks like

A well-run first Greek lesson should cover the same ground for almost every beginner, roughly in this order.

1. Introductions in Greek (5 minutes). Γεια σας, με λένε…, είμαι από… . The tutor should have you saying these out loud in the first five minutes. 2. The alphabet check (10 minutes). They should quickly gauge which letters you already know and flag the tricky ones (η vs ι, γ, χ). 3. One useful sentence pattern (10 minutes). Usually something like 'είμαι + adjective' or 'θέλω + noun' so you leave with a small piece of working Greek. 4. A homework assignment and a goal chat (5 minutes). What do you want to be able to do in Greek in three months? A good tutor turns that into a plan.

If the first lesson is 45 minutes of the tutor talking about their own qualifications and no Greek comes out of your mouth, that's a red flag.

How often, and for how long?

The evidence from research on adult language learning is fairly consistent, and it lines up with what most tutors will tell you.

• Two 30-minute sessions a week beats one 60-minute session, because retrieval practice benefits from spacing.
• Under 25 minutes and you lose too much time to warm-up and closing chat.
• Over 60 minutes and most beginners start losing focus and retention drops.

A sensible pattern for the first six months: two 30-minute sessions per week, plus 15 to 20 minutes of self-study daily on grammar and vocabulary using an app like Greek2Me. The tutor sessions cover speaking, correction, and questions; the app handles drilling and retention between sessions. This split tends to progress people faster than either alone.

How to prepare between lessons

The single biggest predictor of tutor-lesson value is how much work you do between lessons.

• Review the previous lesson within 24 hours. Any notes the tutor sent, any vocab, any sentence you struggled with. This is when memory is most fragile.
• Bring three questions to every lesson. Even simple ones ('why is it το παιδί and not ο παιδί'). It turns you from a passive receiver into an active learner and gives the tutor useful signal on what to teach.
• Do the drilling elsewhere. Don't waste tutor time on flashcards or verb tables. Use Greek2Me's verb drill and quiz tools to grind those between sessions, then use tutor time for conversation and correction.
• Record short voice notes. Some tutors will let you send a 60-second Greek voice note between lessons for a quick correction. If yours does, use it.

Red flags in a Greek tutor

If any of these show up in the first two lessons, try someone else.

• They only speak English at you. Even at A1 you should hear Greek constantly, with English used sparingly for explanation.
• They correct every single word. Constant correction kills fluency-building. A good tutor picks two or three key errors per session and lets small ones slide.
• They have no plan. If lesson two feels randomly assembled with no reference to lesson one, they're winging it. Move on.
• They push very long packages. '20 hours upfront for a discount' before you've done a trial is a warning sign.
• They speak a strong regional dialect and won't switch. Cypriot, Cretan and Pontic Greek are beautiful but not what you'll meet as an early learner. Ask for Standard Modern Greek for the first year.

Do you need a tutor at all?

For the first 6 to 8 weeks you probably don't. The alphabet, the first 200 words, and the present tense of είμαι and έχω can all be learned from a decent app plus some YouTube content. Ravi and Fatima both spent their first two months on Greek2Me and Language Transfer's audio course (languagetransfer.org/complete-greek) before booking a tutor, and they arrived at lesson one with enough foundation to make the tutor time far more valuable.

The rough test: if you can already introduce yourself in Greek, count to 20, and read a simple menu, a tutor will accelerate you. If you can't, spend a month on foundations first and then start.