Karuna

Lessons with Karuna are always a pleasure. She is calm, patient, and looks for ways to draw out your strengths so you pay less attention to your flaws. She has a wealth of resources to help you study and assigns homework that gets you thinking outside of the regular book work. Karuna engages with you in a very casual conversational manner that helps you relax and she actively listens to try to understand what you are saying. I never feel like she is distracted or inattentive during my lessons with her. Since I am very nervous when it comes to speaking, there are often awkward pauses that Karuna adeptly fills in with questions or her own insights to keep the conversation going. I highly recommend Karuna if you are beginning Japanese or if you just need somebody to help you with speaking practice. She gives good travel suggestions too!

Karuna gave a great presentation in the first lesson of how she teaches, what texts she uses, and she answered all my questions. Very prepared. Looking forward to working with her.

Karuna is an excellent teacher with seeming endless amounts of patience. She is a pleasure to learn with. I highly recommend giving her lessons a shot.

she rocks

Karuna is fantastic! Very encouraging, she is always looking for fun ways to personalize her lessons to keep learning atmosphere entertaining and engaging.

I've now taken classes with Karuna for a couple of months, and I would recommend her to everyone who wants to learn Japanese. Each week I feel my language skills and confidence grow; she's an expert at navigating what I need in my lessons, and she always tries her best to draw language out of me, even when I'm not sure of it myself. On top of that, she always assigns excellent homework material and includes extra resources to ensure that what's talked about during lesson time sticks. However, the best part of learning from Karuna is that I feel I've gained more than just a language instructor. The environment she provides makes it feel like I just get to sit down to chat with a friend who's cheering on my journey each week. It's easy stay positive and focused when you have her in your corner!