Having a Japanese Co-worker is a blessing

We recently hired a Japanese website developer on our development team.

So she got hired 2 months ago and after 2 weeks, I told her that I have the JLPT test coming up soon and **she proposed the idea** that she will help me improve my Japanese in time and I will help her improve her coding skills.

We use Slack and calls for communication; the deal is that we only communicate using Japanese when typing but when we call we can speak English / Japanese.

We became very close so we don’t only speak about work but other stuff as well which is great for practice.

**Biggest takeaways:**

\- We converse only in Japanese and if I make a mistake, she correct’s it so I always learn the correct way / natural way of saying stuff.

\- She is also a part time English teacher who teaches English in Japan. She is also very well educated.

\- Natural way of speaking/writing. She teaches me the best ways or the way Japanese people typically speak everyday as she also lives in Japan working remotely for us.

\- Having ondemand listening practice and how stuff should be pronounced is huge.

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I’ve learned more in the last 2 months than I did in the last 6 months.

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This made me realize that I think those who are considering paying for a dedicated native language exchange partner, they should if they can afford it. It seems that having direct consistent communication with someone will help you learn 5x as fast rather than possibly being misguided online. Not that it’s required but it can make your life easier.

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Does anyone have a similar story of improving faster with a dedicated native speaker? I’m looking forward to seeing where I will be within the next 6 months at this rate.