AKI HAPPY

My weekly Happy Conversation lessons with Aki Sensei have become a really important part of my study routine. It’s funny how it works - on any given week I often feel like I’m struggling but I can look back to a few months ago and see how much progress I’ve made. Her infinite patience with my clumsy Japanese is much appreciated, and she always gives me enough time to work out what I want to say. She is clearly a gifted and experienced teacher and I’m really glad I found her on this site!

Aki-Sensei is an excellent teacher. She is attentive to the student and makes the lesson fun and engaging. She also made sure to communicate very well before the day of lesson to get to know a little about my daughter and made the lesson fun for her. Thank you so much! If you book with this teacher, you will not be disappointed! We will book again.

Today was the first lesson with Aki sensei, it was a great lesson! She prepared cards with different topics, such as: - If you could tell something to all people on the Earth, what it would be? - If you have a chance, would you go to the Mars? - What book made the biggest impression on you? I think its a great way to make lesson, every time we can pick different themes and discuss it. Your Japanese level will be improved much faster if you will speak on different themes everytime, in this way you can broad you vocabulary, and also you can heard what Sensei thinks about that, which is very interesting as we all have totally different backgrounds, and that that we can talk about anything online while studing language its just great. Thank you Aki-sensei, looking forward to the next lesson with you!

I find listening and speaking to be the most challenging skills to learn (followed closely by reading and writing, lol), but Aki Sensei’s lessons are really helping me improve. Today we talked mostly about work-related topics, which I thought would be difficult because my work is fairly technical and difficult to explain even in English. To my surprise, with only a little vocabulary assistance from Sensei, I was able to talk about various work-related topics much more effectively than I thought I could. I definitely couldn’t do that a few months ago, so I’m really starting to feel like my weekly lessons with Aki Sensei are helping.

I really enjoyed today’s Happy Conversation lesson with Aki Sensei. Each lesson she lets me choose from either simple, medium, or difficult questions, and today I picked “difficult”. These are usually questions which are difficult for me to answer even in English, so it is a challenge for me to express fairly complicated ideas in Japanese with my limited grammar and vocabulary. Although difficult for me to do and probably painful for Sensei to listen to, these lessons are particularly helpful for me because they really stretch my abilities and push me out of my comfort zone. No two lessons are ever alike, and that’s one of the many things I like about working with Aki Sensei!

Having weekly one-on-one time with Aki Sensei has been incredibly helpful to develop my conversational and overall language skills. Today I was super busy and I was not well prepared for my lesson, but Aki Sensei always adapts to whatever level I’m at on a given day and we still had a good lesson (just slower than usual, lol). Even on days like today, I’m glad I was able to work with Aki Sensei and I look forward to next week (and I promise to be better prepared - よろしくお願いします！）