Languages MA Graduate offering Japanese Tutoring from total beginner to JLPT N2

Experience

I am an MA Japanese graduate of SOAS, University of London, offering online Japanese tutoring to new or intermediate learners of the language.

I make my own lesson materials based on two commonly-used textbooks so my learners will not have to buy any additional materials.

I passed JLPT N3 after studying Japanese for just under a year, and later attained a distinction grade in my final J400 (advanced Japanese, approximately N2 equivalent) module at SOAS, and as a learner of Japanese I am able to empathise with beginners, while also pushing them to do their very best. One of my biggest frustrations with learning providers is a complete under estimation of beginners’ ability to learn. I have several students who had been “learning” Japanese for months of years, but still couldn’t read hiragana or katakana, let alone kanji!

I like to get my students reading hiragana and katakana script within one to two weeks, and aim for 25 new kanji characters every fortnight. Japanese is a very structural language, and most of the difficulty of learning script can be overcome with smart study tools. I use Anki, a free spaced repetition flashcard software, to help students learn kanji in a time efficient way, and can provide you with flash cards all the way from elementary japanese up to the more advanced JLPT N2 level.

I have digitised all of my lesson plans and like to start students off with the Minna No Nihongo textbook - which students can buy or source online themselves, or just use my summarised worksheets alongside an Anki vocab flashcard deck. I want to get my students in a position where they can quickly engage with the language, so I do like to push my learners to do their best. This means absolutely NO ROMAJI (English letters to show you how to “read” the japanese syllabic hiragana/katakana scripts). The initial learning curve can be a bit steep, but all of my students (teenagers and adults) have so far been able to overcome it and regularly read/translate passages commensurate with their ability.

You won’t be able to speak like they do in anime immediately. We start off with masu/desu polite/distal form first to enable you to speak non-offensively to just about anyone about basic topics, and slowly introduce verb conjugations and plain/familiar form later on. If you do consume a lot of japanese media, like anime, manga, j-dramas and music, you may be at an advantage with your pronunciation and general understanding of sentence structure, so we might be able to adjust the pace accordingly. If you are a completely new learner, you are a blank slate and won’t need to un-learn any bad habits!