I recently decided to try doing daily 30-minute sessions with an online japanese tutor (a native) 5x a week, to work on my reading mostly, and for some conversation. I chose an interesting looking fantasy novel, and we’re going through it together as he confirms my understanding, discusses the content of the story with me, helps me with vocab etc.
As someone who’s been going at it solo for a long time now it feels really good to have this kind of support daily. It’s really motivating. And it helps me confirm that I know what I’m doing and I can trust my own understanding; sometimes I have this weird subconscious doubt that I’m not actually understanding Japanese because that’s just like… impossible or something lol. Having a real Japanese person right there with me each day witnessing me and confirming my knowledge is just really helpful.
Anyone else had experiences with seeing Japanese tutor regularly? Was it a positive experience?
4 comments
Not seeing a tutor but I am a tutor, I am glad to hear you had an positive experience. I always try to tell people it makes a big difference in your language learning journey! I’ve always personally liked 1 on 1 vs classes when learning language.
Good luck!
Tutor and teacher here:
We love hearing how much we’re helping! Even if you don’t see the progress, we do.
I have one student who’s always challenging himself and getting better every day.
I have one student who’s just starting but is actively trying to find opportunities to speak.
I am seeing two tutors right now.
I feel like I’ve improved in my speaking and listening skills a lot just by having some Japanese person to talk with regularly.
I prefer a lot more the style of one of my tutors over the other though. The other one follows a system that reminds me of what I’ve heard is the way Japanese kids use to learn English at school. It doesn’t feel super effective, and I am wondering if I should just increase the number of classes with the first tutor instead.
> it helps me confirm that I know what I’m doing and I can trust my own understanding; sometimes I have this weird subconscious doubt that I’m not actually understanding Japanese because that’s just like… impossible or something lol
same same same