Inside the Lessons

You speak for 80% of the lesson. I speak for about 20%.

That ratio is the whole design. You already understand far more Japanese than you can produce — what you are short of is the experience of using it. So the lesson exists to give you that experience, again and again, in the situations you will actually be in.

Twenty years of doing this with working professionals, one at a time, is what tells me which situations those are.

Inside the Lessons

You speak for 80% of the lesson. I speak for about 20%.

Twenty years of doing this with working professionals, one at a time, is what tells me which situations those are.

Chosen for You — Then Taken Further

Most courses hand you a textbook and ask you to keep up with it. Here, the books are chosen for you: one or more, selected once I understand your level and what you need Japanese for, and sent to you around your second lesson. They give the work its structure and its progression, and most of each lesson is built on them.

What no published book can do is know your week. So when something in your own work or life calls for Japanese — a presentation next month, the phrases you keep needing at your child's school, the small talk before a client dinner, the questions a journalist will ask you after the match — I write the material for it, and we work on it in the lesson.

This is only possible one to one. It is the reason I have never taught any other way.

Three Tracks — Used Alone, or in Combination

DAILY LIFE

For living here, not only working here. Hospitals, the city office, contractors, neighbors, the conversation at the school gate. We rehearse the situation you are about to face, in words you can actually produce, until it is no longer something you quietly dread.

BUSINESS

Meetings, presentations, negotiation, keigo and the etiquette around it — including the parts no textbook explains. How to disagree without causing offense. How to soften a refusal. What a silence in a Japanese meeting means. We work from your own documents and your own meetings, not invented ones.

JLPT — N5 THROUGH N1

Full preparation at every level, with a roadmap running from today to exam day. Details below.

Most students combine two. A senior manager may spend half a lesson on the vocabulary of his Monday meeting, and the other half on the conversation at his daughter's school. That is entirely normal here.

From Complete Beginner to Near-Native

Complete beginners We begin speaking in your first lesson. Many schools require hiragana and katakana before you may start; I do not. We build kana alongside speech, using a romaji or kana textbook depending on what suits you, so that you are producing real sentences within your first weeks rather than copying characters.

Bring what you did not understand this week — a screenshot, a sign, a sentence a colleague said to you. We start there. (Taking a photo or a quick note in the moment makes this far easier.)

N4 and above

Articles and current events, discussed rather than translated. Video and podcasts, followed by real questions. Situations from your own work and week, rehearsed in your own words.

There is no single correct answer. We repeat until the phrase belongs to you — until it comes out without your having to assemble it.

N2, N1 and beyond

Precision, register and nuance. Writing that reads as though an adult professional wrote it. Keigo that lands the way you intended. The ability to lead a discussion rather than follow one.

What You Take Away From Every Lesson

The vocabulary and expressions from each session are turned into a digital flashcard set and sent to you after class. You never have to write things down while you should be speaking, and nothing is left behind in the video call.

A few minutes of review a day is what moves a word from "I have seen that" to "I can use that." Over a year, this quietly becomes the largest single part of your progress — and it costs you almost no additional time.

If You Are Preparing for the JLPT

We start from your exam date and work backwards.

You receive a roadmap covering the months ahead — or the full year: what is covered when, which skills are built first, where the checkpoints fall, and what you should be able to do by the time you reach each one.

You will always know where you are, and what is left. For someone preparing around a full working week, that visibility is what removes the anxiety. It is also, in my experience, the single largest reason students finish what they started.

Your lessons will not look exactly like any of this.

They will be built from your goal, your level, and your week.

SEE THE COACHING PLANS