⭐ 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.

In this lesson I am still brushing off the rust from when I was at Thanksgiving. I'm finding myself to have more and more need of polishing the Japanese that I know because fairly common sentences are quite difficult to master in one shot. The difference between もどる and もどってくる are somewhat a bit tricky for me to sort out in my head. Also my 平板 sucks still and I need to find some way to just drill it into my head so I stop lowering the pitch going into the high part of the word. I've at least gotten to the point where I can recognize I'm wrong a lot before being told so, but recognition only goes so far when I keep saying the wrong thing. Also I learnt to avoid さきに for saying first because it's not the meaning of the word, which is ahead of, I should be utilizing まず instead. Not to mention that a phrase like come back home (家に戻ってくる) is modified by "first" not by placing it inside the phrase, but before/after it. My mistake was (家を先に戻って来る）

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

しちじ and ななじかん, these two are important to know the distinction between since they switch up depending on if you're talking about the hour or an amount of hours. We also brushed up on expressing "being in the middle of" something with て＋いる＋ところだ and I continued to make some silly mistakes like はやいから instead of はやくから and forgetting immediately to say "after" in after 5 minutes.

During the lesson today we went over a bunch of refreshers as I'd taken a two-day break for Thanksgiving, but even in that short amount of time because I hadn't studied at all my ability was very rusty. I tried at one point in the homework to make noun modification on a verb Dict＋の＋こと when it should never be a combination of those last two. Also in trying to apply some passive voice because I thought it'd work in one of the examples on the homework I realized that it sounds quite unnatural when used the way I said it and a much simpler way that actually carries over the correct subject from the english translation exists.