Private Pitch-accent and Pronunciation lessons!

Good morning, Patrons!

Over the years, many patrons have asked for private lessons or have asked about getting individual feedback on their pitch accent. However, due to time constraints and certain health issues I’ve dealt with over the years, I’ve unfortunately never been able to provide individual support like this to everyone who asks. Even so, I’ve wanted to find some way to expand the series and offer more.

So, my business partner JP and I decided to develop something different.

We have been working with a native Japanese speaker to develop content designed for use in individual or small group lessons, based on our Japanese pitch accent and pronunciation series here on Patreon. This person studied phonetics and teaching Japanese in university before training and working as an announcer in television news and other programs for several years. She continues to train in pronunciation, and has been teaching Japanese with an approach that integrates pronunciation and accent training.

Our goal is to provide someone studying Japanese pitch accent and pronunciation a way to get feedback and instruction from a native speaker to help improve their phonetic awareness, pitch accent, and pronunciation. Naturally, having this kind of direct feedback from a trained native speaker is incredibly useful as often times people learning pitch accent are unable to pick up on their own mistakes. While natives can almost always hear these mistakes, they don’t usually have a framework like ours to help them identify and address the learner’s mistakes.

And I’m very glad to announce that we are now ready to start the first phase of this project! For this initial phase, we are recruiting a limited number of students such that we’ll have experience to draw on in the future when doing a larger launch. In these lessons the teacher will cover concepts introduced in the Patreon series, giving feedback while taking students through multiple pitch accent pronunciation drills, and will assign homework to reinforce learning between lessons.

This first phase will have two groups of three students each. These groups will meet twice a week on weekdays between 10:00 AM and 7:00 PM Japan time for four weeks, for a total of eight lessons.

Participants will be chosen through an application process, selected on the content of their application and also on their availability, to ensure we have groups that can meet online at the same time every week during this phase. In order to cover the expenses and time of the teacher, there will be a one-time fee of $160 USD for the lessons (which breaks down to $20 per 40 minute lesson).

If you are interested, please download the PDF attached to this post for more information and how to apply. If you have any questions or comments, please don’t hesitate to leave them in the comment section below!

Please note: The application deadline is 11:59 PM, Friday, March 24. Further information and other dates are included in the attached PDF.

As always, thank you very much for the continued support, and good luck with your Japanese studies!

Dōgen