Meet Miki-sensei

Meet Miki-sensei

I have taught Japanese for over twenty years — to executives, diplomats, professional athletes, and the families who came with them.

Almost all of it one to one.

I have taught Japanese for over twenty years — to executives, diplomats, professional athletes, and the families who came with them.

Almost all of it one to one.

Registered Japanese Language Teacher (登録日本語教員) — Japan's national qualification

B.A. in Literature, Kobe University

Former contracted instructor, U.S. Consulate General Osaka-Kobe

Five years teaching at a Japanese language school in Kobe, alongside my own students, to deepen my JLPT instruction

More than twenty years of one-to-one teaching, online and face to face in the Kansai area

Why I Teach One Person at a Time

A class moves at the speed of the class.

A working week does not.

I know this from both sides. Alongside my own students, I spent five years teaching at a Japanese language school here in Kobe — deliberately, to build my JLPT teaching on something more systematic than my own experience alone. Those years taught me what a syllabus does well, and what it can never do.

What it can never do is choose the right book for this person, write the material their Thursday meeting calls for, or notice the single grammar point that keeps tripping them up and build the next lesson around it.

One to one takes longer to prepare, and it does not scale. It is also the only way I know that produces the result.

Where I Learned to Teach Professionals

I studied literature at Kobe University, and qualified as a Japanese language instructor in 2004.

Early in my career I taught at the U.S. Consulate General Osaka-Kobe, as a contracted instructor of the language provider the consulate worked with. Teaching diplomats and their families set the standard I have worked to ever since: discretion, punctuality, and preparation that is finished before the lesson begins.

Who I Teach

Professionals, and the people closest to them.

Executives and specialists from global technology, finance, pharmaceutical, consulting and automotive companies.

Professional athletes. And often their spouses and their children.

Their levels run from the first word of Japanese to N1. Their reasons run from a visa deadline to a conversation at the dinner table. What they have in common is that their time is limited and their standards are high.

Around five hundred of them in over twenty years, almost all of them one to one.

One More Thing

I have lived outside Japan — in Malta, and in China. I know what it is to sit at a table where everyone else understands, and to smile at a joke you did not catch. It is a quiet kind of tiredness. It is also the reason I teach the way I do.

WELC's lessons are built around speaking, so that you feel the pleasure of being understood in Japanese as early as possible.

I look forward to meeting you.

Miki Sasaki (Miki-sensei)

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THE FAMILY TABLE COURSE