May 20th, 2025 - Trial Lesson
This lesson was just a 20 minute taste of what will become 90 minute sessions three times a week (I am taking the standard course). The instructor was a nice person, who spoke both Japanese and English. Introductions were short though, as we jumped into the lesson rather quickly.
I realized at this point that the class would be taught almost entirely in Japanese. I was surprised with myself here, as I was able to keep up despite having very limited experience with Japanese outside of anime, manga, Wanikani, and social media. Of course, the instructor kept it basic.
The instructor told us to greet each other and say where we are from. I was EXTREMELY shy at this point - especially at the lack of shyness visible on my classmates faces in the group call - but barely managed to croak out my name and where I am from.
We proceeded to some listening exercises where we challenged to, in English, explain what the audio said. The topic of the lesson was “趣味はなんですか？” (What are your hobbies?) and so the audios contained short and sweet conversations about the characters’ hobbies.
To keep this short, we practiced until I eventually came to the sentence I constructed: 自転車に乗ることです。あと、歩くのが好きです。Pretty sure there is supposed to be a も in there but I’m not sure where.
So the trial lesson provided a basic grammar lesson and I managed to learn how to talk about my hobbies. We rated our performance at the end of the class. I gave my three stars out three, of course. I was so proud of myself for overcoming that shyness and actually managing to speak a little Japanese! It rained on my parade a little though when the instructor said that other instructors MAY or MAY NOT be able to speak ANY English. That scares me a bit, but with how this class went I think that’ll be fine… I think.
I feel as though my self studies through BunPro and Wanikani helped immensely. This course will give me better direction for my continued studies. I officially start taking the actual classes in early July, but I’ll update my thread if anything else happens before then.
This course, the Basic Course 1, comes out to ~$20(US) per session over the course of a few months, totaling 45 sessions at 135,000 yen/~$930. I think that’s more than worth it considering we provided the course materials at no additional expense.