Giving Japanese lessons in Christchurch. 14 years experience living in Japan. 12 years working as an assistant language teacher in Japan.

Brett is highly motivated to learn conversational Japanese, with a personal interest in Japanese culture that has been stimulated by his involvement with the country with his business. He has already begun learning some fixed expressions, and shortly he will be able to start learning some sentence structures which will let him express a wider variety of ideas in Japanese.

The first thing that impresses me about Oliver is his self-motivation, his authentic personal interest in the subject. He also has some goals to work towards that should be very helpful for his study. Because the goals will take 2 or 3 years to achieve, patience will be important, but it seems like he understands this.
Oliver has an impressive knowledge of some of the technical aspects of the language, which showed me he has a good capacity for learning. I have told him that the next step is to be able to apply that same knowledge quickly, in natural communication situations. This takes time, but I have some ideas to help him in this endeavour.

I was impressed by Damin's motivation and entrepreneurial spirit. The questions in his survey were well selected to elicit useful information. Hopefully my answers have been useful to him.