Yasu

My lesson with Yasu went well. It was also a reminder of why (in my opinion) it is so important to work with a competent native speaker. I know that many websites say you can learn a language all by yourself. But, I don't think that is true. I think you need a skilled teacher like Yasu. He has been very, very helpful to my learning/understanding of Japanese.

1st class. Have you ever watched YouTube videos of a Japanese guy nitpicking foreigners' Japanese in a friendly way. It was like that which is what I was looking for. Almost all Japanese speakers tell foreigners that their Japanese is fantastic, which is really nice, but doesn't help us improve. So doing the pronunciation lesson with Yasu sensei was time extremely well spent in my quest to sound better. Thank you!

Excellent class! Today, we worked on 〜てください and how to conjugate the verbs to create sentences. I appreciate his gentle corrections and his patience while I try to pronounce various words in a natural manner, especially ください。I tend to rush my pronunciation, and leave out sounds, so I am grateful for this class. I will continue to practice until I can say it perfectly. I am determined! :) ありがとうございました　やすせんせい！

Continuing to improve my listening skill was the focus of my lessons. We used a couple different techniques like repeating. Yasu sensei made several suggestions as well. It was a challenging and fun lesson.

Another wonderful lesson! During my Japanese lesson with Yasu Sensei, it felt like he seamlessly wove together various aspects of the language. Today, the focus was on (me) retelling a story/folktale I had read, but through that, I also learned more about sentence structure, grammar, and vocabulary. I gained a lot from my lesson and am looking forward to the next one.

Yasu is very aware of pronunciation rules and basic linguistics, which is good. There did seem to be some peculiar things that surprised me (e.g my "k" being wrong, which I thought was like English), so this suggests Yasu is very attentive and speaks clearly. Next lesson we will be focusing more on the pitch accent (we could only do that in a hurried manner today due to a lack of time), and hopefully some basic words. I am curious how Yasu's teaching will be when we move away from pure pronunciation and also focus on grammar and the like. Luckily, I know quite some Kanji from Classical Chinese and am familiar with many types of grammar, so I think this will be alright!