⭐ Ejderha Sato ⭐

As 2023 concludes with today's lesson, it’s time to reflect on a year and a half of learning Korean! I am deeply and incredibly thankful for discovering Sato! While I began the year familiar with many words, now I can engage in basic Korean conversations. My proficiency in conjugating between past, present, and casual to polite tenses has grown significantly. Sato's teaching skills are evident; he gauges precisely when to challenge me and when to allow independent exploration. Whenever I struggle with a concept, his patient explanations ensure clarity. He will always keep at it until I have fully grasped the topic. His organized Google Docs of lesson notes are invaluable, and his commitment shines through—even when responding to late-night questions! Beyond language, Sato also adds invaluable insights into Korean culture and lifestyle. His meticulous attention to my pronunciation ensures I sound as authentic as possible. Truly a dedicated and skilled instructor! Thank you!

Another fun and very helpful lesson with Sato-sensei! I appreciate his patience and understanding when I forget vocabulary or make mistakes. And I'm super enjoying the pace and really am absorbing the new information well. I also enjoy all the cultural and language context that he gives as we go through the lesson. It gives so much more life and meaning to learning Japanese. I also found it very easy to study up on the previous lesson thanks to the Google Doc notes and organization.

During this lesson we went over counters more in the form of what is and isn't conversational. I remembered もう一つの例文をお願いします, but forgot the conversational 例文をもう一つお願いします。 Also we worked through the "verb"　利く which through looking over the common usages seems to be used as more of an adjectivification for nouns. Also in the process I learned how to really study a piece of vocab by understanding how it's used with other words to find the most common usage for it instead of just one example that I can't think of how to use outside of itself. I need to work on my pronunciation for 思う as well because I'm not really going the up and dropping motion well enough. Aside from those, I still need to work more on segmenting sentences into chunks that I can then use better to reorganize into Japanese.

As another year studying with Sato San is finishing, I feel the need to write a proper review. A new year's resolution two years ago changed my life, I decided to try learning another language and shortly after discovered Sato San. Looking back after almost 100 lessons it is hard to believe we've come so far. Starting from scratch, we are now conducting class in almost exclusively Japanese. I am still far from proficient, but feel like I have an extremely solid foundation to build my intermediate level Japanese on. Sato San's style of teaching puts the ball in your court as a learner. The amount of information and study material he provides is abundant, its up to you as a student to study and apply. We have come a very long way together and I am very grateful as a student to have found such a great guide on my language Journey. We continue to trudge towards the metaphorical peak of Everest together. Sato San- 本当に　ありがとうございました

Duiring the class today we talked a bit about professors and classes in college with japanese today. I learned the difference between 怒鳴る and 叫ぶ, with the first being more for yelling at someone while the other is more of an emotional outburst of sorts.

During this lesson we went over a bit more in detail of しんらいする vs しんようする for expressing "to trust", and in doing so I realized that しんらいする is more of a blind faith sort of trust while しんようする is more for a verifiable sort of trust. Also for saying しんようする it seems like it's more effective to not really try to pronounce the ん sound at all but instead act as though I was going to do an ŋ but not exactly. Also we talked about the myriad of ways to talk about New Years and related vocabulary. Then in the case of saying "I'll have to look into that later" instead of a more hard しないといけない this works better: "あとで　ちょっと　しらべて　みようって おもいます。"