Your Passion for Learning = My Passion for Teaching

I enjoy thinking about the concept of ‘learning’ and ‘teaching’. For me, ‘learning’ is a process of your personal development, not just for knowledge or for social status. Therefore, my ‘teaching’ is focused on supporting my student’s personal growth as a global citizen in this globalising world.

I found language learning is one of the best ways for your personal development, especially Japanese language. I love to see my student starts seeing the world differently after every lesson.

Especially, if you are studying Japanese language, it is crucial to understand Japanese perspectives and social behaviour, such as creating harmony and being considerate to others, the culture created by the group-oriented society in this small island.

My favourite psychologist in development of language acquisition, Lev Vygotsky (1986), said our thought and our speech are related in ‘Thought and Language’. For example, positive people think something positive and say something positive. And negative people think something negative and say something negative.

Thus, if you want to improve your Japanese, just memorising words and sentence structures does not enhance your learning effectively. Instead, it is the key to understand the cultural aspects and the native mind-sets behind the expressions in depth. And my students sometimes use Google Translation but the Japanese sentence does not make sense to me.

This is the reason why I enjoy teaching typical Japanese expressions which do not exist in English. This is the moment that both my student and I can share and understand the different ways of thinking from different background each other on the same spot at my lesson.

I hope you have one step forward for your self-development through your Japanese study today.

Best,

Mineko Arai