How I Teach
In general, I am a language teacher, just like any other language teacher. However, where I part company with other language teachers is, that I am YOUR language teacher, not just a teacher who teaches a language to you.
What does this mean, exactly? It means that when I am teaching you, I am teaching only YOU -- of course, using all the techniques and tricks that I have learned over more than two decades of teaching, but most importantly, adapting these methods to YOUR particular needs -- and abilities.
Face it: it may be an uncomfortable truth, but we are NOT all made equal. In the case of learning languages, many, many factors come into play. For example, my father was an excellent student at languages; he could speak and understand Latin -- as high a level as it was possible to go -- German, which he was employed to use as a weapon against the Nazis in WWII, and French, which he acquired over many years for his job.
He was an extremely diligent student of language, but be had one immense drawback: as a child and well into adulthood, he had never learned these languages among native speakers -- in other words, if you would like it to be explained in simple terms, "he learned them from a book."
What this meant for my father was that although he had an incredible facility at learning these languages, and his grasp of grammar and storehouses of vocabulary were immense, his accent often suffered, as he had never learned any foreign languages as a small child. Thus, while his spoken and written German were well above average for his needs, his accent in both languages was heavily American -- something I realized as I grew up speaking the very same languages that he did.
I, however, was born in a country whose second language was English, and for the first ten years of my life I was heavily exposed to this language -- Hindi -- because that was the language my caregivers and many, many people around me in daily life spoke.
I cannot speak Hindi any more, but the foundations for learning other languages was laid. The second language I learned was French (if you don't count Latin, at which I was apparently an excellent student) which for the first few years I learned from non-native teachers from textbooks. Then, I was thrust into a French-language environment in Africa, where everyone around me -- my friends, people I dealt with in daily life and others could not speak any English at all. At the age of 14, I was at times thinking in French, because I was using it so much.
And then I went to Japan. I started learning Japanese from scratch at age 31, both spoken and written -- and the scenario was either sink or swim. I took no formal lessons, but used my every day dealings with my students and other Japanese people to "steal" my knowledge. I didn't just sit there and absorb the language -- I actively set myself learning goals and went all-out to learn Japanese, to the point that I was coming in to work two hours early every day just to study Japanese by myself, with help by the staff if I needed to ask any questions or practice my new-found knowledge.
Thus, I learned Japanese completely organically -- absolutely, with the aid of books and other learning materials, but I never formally took a lesson from a teacher of Japanese.
Thus, you might say I learned my Japanese the REAL way -- not with exercises on page 64 but from a discussion over saké and peanuts at a stand-up bar.
And frequently, that is how I teach Japanese -- not from Page 64 or even page 2 -- but from the book of life.
So my lessons almost always start with a premise, but often veer wildly off-track, because that is what a living language is like -- changing, moving around, rarely staying on-topic.
Thus I caution you that in any given lesson, we may start with verb structure but end with slang expressions -- that is just how things go, both in my lessons and in real life.
To some people, this is uncomfortable and they genuinely feel as if they are wasting their time -- it has happened many times to me that the student abruptly quits because they feel as if they are getting nowhere. But for those who STICK WITH IT, you will see that there IS method to the apparent chaos and your Japanese WILL improve, sometimes in huge leaps and bounds. I know this because I have seen it happen -- to MY students. And the good thing is, if you take your own time and use it to learn Japanese by yourself according to my recommendations, YOU will see it happen to YOU; this is not an idle boast, but a promise with VIEWABLE EVIDENCE.
So what I am saying to you, dear student, is that I do not teach Japanese to students. I teach Japanese to INDIVIDUALS, whose progress, needs, wants, frustrations, doubts, and everything else that might affect a language student is uniquely THEIRS -- one size most definitely does NOT fit all in my book.
So join the club of which there is only one member: YOU.
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