Native Japanese speaker with experience and certification of teaching! More than 5,000 lessons taught

Saki-sensei is OUTSTANDING!!! She has helped me gain so much confidence and practice with my speaking, and is so patient and understanding with me as I stumble around for words. Conversations always feel cooperative yet guided, I don't think I've ever once felt awkward. We also do writing practices, homework review, and textbook-guided lessons, which are all incredibly helpful for giving the lesson a structure that I deeply appreciate. Highly, highly recommended!

It is a joy to write a recommendation for my phenomenal teacher, Saki先生. Saki is a true professional who clearly comes to each lesson prepared, with a singular goal: to help me learn Japanese.

She creates an environment where it feels natural to build trust and take risks in speaking and writing. As a teacher, she is both gentle and encouraging, while still teaching each lesson with purpose and direction. Her warmth and patience are appreciated, as is the sense of her genuine investment in my progress.

As a native of Japan and now a young mother living in Brazil, Saki brings a level of cultural richness to our lessons that I have never experienced before. Our conversations go far beyond language—I’ve learned so much about nuance in language and customs and differences and similarities across cultures. I’m not just learning the language, but the subtle cultural nuances and the meaningful similarities and differences between cultures that make learning a language so fun. An added plus is our compatible time zones, which allow me to join each lesson energized and fully engaged.

And so I would like to highly recommend Saki先生 to anyone looking for a skilled, thoughtful, and deeply committed Japanese language teacher.

I have been taking lessons with Saki先生 for coming up on 3 years at this point, and I would highly recommend her. The only caveat I might give is that many of the other Japanese teachers/tutors I encountered are extremely structured in their approach, so if you strongly prefer that then I would be clear that is your preference. That said, I have done lessons about images/videos, from textbooks with worksheets, conversational lessons, etc. with Saki先生 and I personally appreciate that she will cover the material while also allowing me to ask tangential questions or use what I'm learning. A common negative experience with other Japanese teachers is that they will cover their material, but only their material, even if I'm OK with/want to spend more time on a tangential point, or in depth on a topic. Saki先生 has always accommodated my preferences in a natural way during lessons.

I would also say that it's clear that Saki先生 has experience with teaching, and that I think that is quite important given how often average native speakers can appear on platforms as teachers. Many such natives will "intuit" how their languages works incorrectly, teaching bad habits. I have and know several Japanese friends at this point, and speak to them in exclusively Japanese, and there is a night and day difference between conversations with Saki先生 and them, even casually. She clearly still listens with a teacher's ear, catching mistakes or unnatural phrasing average people may politely ignore in conversation, and will bring it up after the topic to allow me to spend more time speaking Japanese uninterrupted, but without letting me enforce poor habits.