●Summary

Nationality: HongKong
Age: 30
Occupation: Software Engineer
Reason for learning Japanese: ​​​​​​
I work at a Japanese company, but I often use English, so I don’t have many opportunities to practice Japanese.So, I decided to study Japanese because I wanted to be able to communicate with Japanese people well.

●Trial lesson feedback
【 Level : JLPT N5  (Level 1 in our level chart) 】

※Based on the OPI level criteria, we will evaluate your conversational ability on a scale of 10. If you want to more about conversation level criteria, please check this blog.

・Listening : He can listen if he is asked questions slowly using simple words.
・Speaking : He can speak using simple sentence patterns such as “A is B”. But he cannot conjugate verbs.
・Reading : He can read Hiragana and Katakana accurately.
・Although he knows most of the commonly used Japanese kanji, they are often used with different meanings than in Chinese, and there are many misunderstandings.

※we will evaluate your Japanese ability in terms of Reading, Speaking, Listening aspects.

●Learning plan　Enrollment course: 50 hours course

He often tries to understand Japanese based on English grammar, and it takes him some time to understand expressions that are difficult to translate into English or are unique to Japanese.

Regarding the grammar, he asks questions one by one with skepticism and tries to understand by adding his own interpretation. Corresponding to this, He will be able to solidify his knowledge of Japanese, so we’ll  take our time and give detailed explanations.

Also, he often chats about the day’s events and weekend plans, but he often ends up speaking only English, so I change the sentences into Japanese and add key phrases. I try to create more opportunities to speak Japanese, such as asking questions related to the topic of the text, etc. And I write and leave messages in the chat so he could always remember it.

●Learning approach

Teaching materials: Original text, Minna no Nihongo

Class frequency: 2 times/week (50 minutes)

How to proceed with the class:

① Vocabulary and grammar- Learn using texts. In the episode to check new vocabulary, we talked about things like predicting the meaning of new words by connecting them with words he already knew, and where he had actually heard them in everyday conversation. While expanding the information, we aim to gain input.

② Speaking- For about 10 minutes at the beginning of each class, we have free conversation and talk about today’s date, day of the week, recent events, and this week’s plans. He often ends up speaking in English, so we work together to correct the sentences into Japanese as appropriate.

③Listening- Ask questions using the sentence patterns he have learned so far.Start with a few questions at the beginning of the class, and during the class, we make time to ask questions and answer them such as ”Do you think so?’”or “What do you think about it, Bon?”’ according to the content of the teaching material.

④Writing (Homework)- As for writing, It  wasn’t seem to really need for it based on his needs, so we didn’t particularly practice during class. For homework, have students create sentences using a sentence pattern practice book.

⑤ Reading (Homework)- Once He have mastered the N5 level sentence patterns,practice reading and understanding long sentences using the reading material on the Minna’s Japanese Summary Questions page.