More courses in development Classes
Our language teaching is based on two fundamental beliefs: Recognising our Learners as Individuals and Promoting Learners' Autonomy Teaching and Learning Beliefs
1. Recognising our Learners as Individuals
This belief is significantly important. Conventional language classes and language courses often view all learners as the same “learners”. Unfortunately, this convention still remains. However, all learners are different from each other. Therefore, when teaching Japanese to others, Nihongo Life recognises that each student is different and are aware of what they will do with the Japanese language in the future. We attempt to integrate your identity into our lessons to make them more enjoyable and to provide you with authentic communication opportunities.
2. Promoting Learners' Autonomy
To be honest with our learners, we need to talk about a certain fact beforehand. If you learn Japanese, only inside our class, we cannot guarantee that your Japanese will significantly improve to the level you are aiming for. This is because of time restriction. Any language learning for most people needs a certain output opportunities and high number of input opportunities. However, most language schools cannot provide their learners to enough input and output opportunities. We are fully aware of this fact and inform our learners in advance. The primary aim of our classes is, therefore, not the completion of your Japanese learning in the classroom. Rather, we aim to provide you with the knowledge, skills and motivation to learn Japanese on your own outside the classroom. We are confident in our Japanese teaching, and you will be able to do more and more things through Japanese language even if you learn Japanese only our class. Please keep in mind that our main aim is to promote your autonomy for learning Japanese.
Course Information
The course is engineered with a "backward design". Conventional Japanese language courses are developed based on what they will teach, such as grammar and vocabulary. However, "backward design" focuses more on the learning outcome of the course (i.e., what learners will be able to do after the course). Nihongo Life is able to offer our learners Japanese language courses and classes that focus on "What our learners can do with the Japanese language".
Our Japanese language courses are designed with groups as the standard rather than private lessons. This is because we value the language learning theory that language learning is facilitated through meaningful communication with others. It is now considered that "others" do not have to be proficient language speakers, such as native speakers and highly proficient language learners. In addition, learning with others often contribute to improve leaners’ motivation. From these points of view, we understand that learning in a group has more advantages than one-to-one Japanese lessons with a teacher. However, we still offer private lessons for those who prefer to study privately and cannot attend group lessons due to time constraints.
Our Japanese lessons do not use any textbooks. We put great emphasis on providing learners with opportunities to communicate with others in Japanese that they would not get from learning with textbooks.
Teacher Profile
Yasu has been teaching Japanese to learners form many different countries and holds a PhD from Macquarie University. His speciality is teaching Japanese, in particular yakuwarigo (role language). Yakuwarigo is a language associated with certain images, such as gender, profession, appearance and personality, and often appears in manga and anime. He argues for importance of yakuwarigo not only in the enjoyment of Japanese products (e.g., anime, manga, movie and novel), but also in everyday conversation. Therefore, he tries to integrate yakuwarigo into his Japanese lessons. His motto is to offer fun Japanese language lessons without following textbooks.