The advantage I have in Montreal is that I speak English and French and am able to teach the culture of the Japanese. A native Japanese teacher will teach their language in a rather robotic fashion, as they will most likely try to teach you as they themselves have been taught English, with heavy emphasis on textbooks and prefabricated dialogues, along with much rote memorisation of vocabulary which may or may not be useful to you in your daily life in Japan.
In general, you will be unable to discuss Japanese culture frankly with them, as they will not consider this necessary to learning Japanese. This is a crucial error; it would be like learning to cook without being told how the various chemical and thermal processes of cooking come together to produce tastes and texture.
Thus, in my teaching of Japanese, I spend a large amount of time discussing "why" certain things about the language are how they are, with a heavy emphasis on looking into the mind of the Japanese as they themselves interact with each other, in addition to how they interact with foreigners.
This will give you insights into the "behind the scenes" of the Japanese language which will spare you the agonizing process of trial and error -- mostly error -- which most beginning learners of Japanese will undergo as they begin to interact with actual Japanese people.
The journey through the process of speaking Japanese is heavily sprinkled with minefields which most textbooks will not warn you about. I will teach you about where to look for these minefields and how to avoid them, in the process gently guiding you away from the textbook-style speech most foreigners will take away from traditional language curricula.
To be brutally frank, the only way to know the Japanese and the way they think is to live, eat, sleep, and interact with them for many years on their home turf. This level of knowledge cannot be learned from the Internet or an intensive course or immersion classes.
However, most of us either do not have the time nor the money to spend several years in Japan in order to learn Japanese; that is what I am here for: to prepare you with a basic framework upon which you can rely when you do get to Japan; so you can hold essential conversations with an average Japanese person and be able to understand what is being said back to you.
The Japanese are a fascinating people, but they simply do not think like we do in almost every fashion. What I will teach you will come from the book that no one has written: the "Unwritten Rule Handbook." You can view this as kind of a "manual" on the Japanese that is generally not shared with foreigners; codes of behaviour that go unspoken about, body language and behaviour that can tell you what is really being said instead of what you think is being said. These societal rules and behaviours are not taught in textbooks yet are crucial to the speaker of Japanese who knows the rules of the game instead of blundering about missing cues and hidden meanings that are especially common to the Japanese culture.
Finally, learning Japanese should be fun; it should never be a chore. As a student, you must put in many hours of study on your own; as a teacher I have no magic pills which will enable you to memorize 600 verbs and their conjugations. However, I can point out which ones you will need more and which ones you can safely skip, thus saving you large amounts of time spent trying to learn everything, when only 15% of everything is necessary in order to communicate.
And by continual digressions on cultural aspects and other fun facts about the Japanese, you will accumulate a wealth of knowledge that you will never get from a website or a textbook.
Add to this a tailored approach to your particular needs instead of a one-size-fits-all teaching style, and you should be ready for your first real encounter with the Japanese in as little as three months.
So then, welcome to the Kamakiri-style of Japanese learning. Hold on to your notebook and get ready for a great ride.
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