Today was my 12-year-old daughter’s 181st lesson with Aki. She has qualified to take a rigorous Japanese class in her middle school next year. Aki has been her only teacher until now. I remember reading Aki’s other reviews at the beginning and noting how so many of her students stayed with her for a long, long time. :) While my daughter will take a break from italki for a while, I will keep Aki’s profile so we can find her again when the right time appears in the future. If you read back in Aki’s reviews you can find my earlier posts from time to time. They all boil down to the fact that I could not have picked a better Japanese teacher for my child. She is simply the best. ありがとうございます, Aki-sensei。またいつか会いましょう!

Aki-Sensei is an excellent teacher. She is attentive to the student and makes the lesson fun and engaging. She also made sure to communicate very well before the day of lesson to get to know a little about my daughter and made the lesson fun for her. Thank you so much! If you book with this teacher, you will not be disappointed! We will book again.

I’ve been taking classes with Aki-san for almost a year now. Classes are always enjoyable and my Japanese has improved so dramatically. Every class we spend time talking in Japanese and then go over the next unit in the Genki textbook. The classes have been a great opportunity to improve my conversation ability and to help me understand various grammar points and to basically put it all together. She is a friendly and very capable teacher and every single class has been so helpful. I look forward to our ongoing language journey!

My weekly Happy Conversation lessons with Aki Sensei have become a really important part of my study routine. It’s funny how it works - on any given week I often feel like I’m struggling but I can look back to a few months ago and see how much progress I’ve made. Her infinite patience with my clumsy Japanese is much appreciated, and she always gives me enough time to work out what I want to say. She is clearly a gifted and experienced teacher and I’m really glad I found her on this site!

Today’s lesson was a lot of fun! With the JLPT coming up in just a few months, most of my study time is now unfortunately focused on things that aren’t very fun. It’s also the phase of studying where I feel like the more Japanese I study, the less I understand. Fortunately, Aki Sensei’s Happy Conversation lessons are exactly the opposite of that - she provides a relaxed space where I can practice without worrying about mistakes and just enjoy being able to have a conversation in Japanese. Today we spent the time talking about fruits and video games. As simple as those topics seem, I got to stretch my vocabulary in an effort to explain a complicated video game and describe fruits that Aki Sensei had never heard of. As always, Aki Sensei was an ideal conversation partner by asking interesting questions, being patient while I worked through complicated phrases, and providing gentle corrections when my grammar got too far off the rails. I’m looking forward to next week’s lesson already!

We missed Aki Sensei but I'm glad we finally made time to brush up on Japanese since my daughter has taken a break for the past few months. Aki Sensei kept her engaged the entire time.