So at the moment, I’m building my understanding of grammar, and building on my vocabulary as well. And I kinda made the realization that I still lack in speaking skills. I still need to work on my vocabulary until I can comfortably choose a topic to speak about. But I’m sure I’ll need a teacher to talk to in the near future. Until that time comes, what service/teacher/method would you recommend for speaking practice?
BYU independent study?
https://is.byu.edu/
it cost money though
or jat-jp.org (also costs a bit of money for private tutor)
https://jat-jp.org/japanese-tutor/?gclid=EAIaIQobChMI2IT2oP7K9QIVByGtBh355gzCEAAYAiAAEgInE_D_BwE
I can link you to my teacher/tutor if you’d like. You can have a lot of fun in his classes as opposed to many Japanese teachers/tutors who are pretty serious, and he’s a super nice guy. He’s also fluent in English which is extremely useful because the textbooks don’t teach you how to use English idioms/phrases in Japanese (or what Japanese idioms/phrases actually mean in English).
He’s been my teacher for 9 months now, and in that time frame I went from not being able to use basically any of the Japanese I knew (up to N4 at that point) while speaking, to now carrying out full conversations. He was super vital in helping me study for the N3 (which I passed). He’s a bit expensive compared to most other tutors out there, but it’s absolutely worth it. I’m not sure if I can post his name or link to his site without getting flagged for advertising/spam. Granted, he’s referred a lot of his students to use WaniKani to learn Kanji, so it would only be fair 
. You can start with him right away and don’t need to worry about knowing enough grammar/words.
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Have you tried looking at Italki at all? That’s where I’ve gotten my tutors from. Fantastic website, can’t recommend it enough.
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I’m interested,…
Asao Language School https://www.patreon.com/japaneselessons/posts
is a cheap alternative to iTalki and I find it very helpful. If you want to find just one teacher that works for you you’ll need one of the higher tier memberships, but I believe those are still cheaper than iTalki.
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I use Asao as well, and have from a very beginner level. For the lower tiers you can only have one teacher for three lessons total. but an unexpected benefit of that is that it’s quite helpful for reinforcing vocabulary since you repeat common topics (work, family, why are you learning Japanese) quite often. I ended up upgrading to having a regular teacher each week once I found one I was happy with, but still do lessons with trainee teachers for extra speaking practise.
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Mind if you DM me your tutor? Does he teach you reading via wanikani as well as speaking?
This is my sensei, Ken-sensei’s website: https://www.japanesespeakingclub.com/
He doesn’t teach with WaniKani. You first learn from Genki 1 and 2, then you either work from Tobira or the Soumatome/Shinkanzen books if you are studying for the JLPT. He recommended WaniKani to me for self-study because he’d heard it helped other students, but often brings up that you should be careful with the vocab they teach on here, because a lot of it is rarely used (and mainly meant to teach you the Kanji.)
Hope this was helpful and good luck!
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