So I'm planning on becoming a personal tutor for awhile, partially for teaching experience and partially for money whilst I'm at university. I'll be tutoring beginner Japanese for now, at a relatively cheap rate as I have not had any previous experience of tutoring. However, I want to try and do the best job I can.

I've started putting together comprehensive lesson plans for myself based on a textbook I know very well, but have left room for flexability in case they have specific requests. I'll talk about what they hope to gain from the experience in the first lesson.

I think advice specifically regarding how to teach vocabulary would be very helpful, as I obviously don't want to dump huge lots of vocab lists on someone or overwhelm anyone. I thought about possibly putting together an anki vocab deck for whoever I'm tutoring, but I dunno if that'd be a good idea really.

But yes, any and all advice welcome! Also previous experiences of good/bad tutors and what to avoid doing would also be great. Thank you!

This isn't really a tip for someone doing it as a sidejob, but if I ever became a language teacher, I would emulate Pierre Capretz. This is how he starts out, to a class of beginners:

Again, this isn't a tip. But I've learned several languages over the years, and this is by far the best, most helpful language course I've ever come across, for any language.

If you check it out, you're bound to learn something you can use. Not so much from how he does it (he has had a lot of practice, and has a lot of resources to work with, not to mention that ridiculously hot actress), but from what he is trying to accomplish: keep the students' attention in a natural way, rather than in a forced, "I gotta pay attention and learn this" way.

Thanks, I will check this out ASAP! The sound on my laptop is being dodgy atm and I don't know why, not playing anything at all.

Sorry to bump my own thread (will do it just this once), but does anyone have any advice before I jump into it?

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Quote:So I'm planning on becoming a personal tutor for awhile, partially for teaching experience and partially for money whilst I'm at university. I'll be tutoring beginner Japanese for now, at a relatively cheap rate as I have not had any previous experience of tutoring. However, I want to try and do the best job I can.

You may wish to give additional skype based lessons (or conversations), many learners find it hard to get production experience and this is a nice way for those outside of Japan.

I would take a look at this thread: http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?tid=10730 as it has many reflections on paid lessons/tutoring.

It's always best to teach the vocabulary that's most useful first. You know what's the most depressing thing? To finish a semester (or two) of a Japanese class and realize you can't understand a single thing from some random book you peek into.

So there's some frequency lists of Japanese words and you can just start teaching the most common ones at the same time as other stuff. It can also be worth asking what their interests are... Personally I find recipes easier to read than most things (since as long as you have a dictionary you tend to be able to understand them even if you don't know grammar). But to someone who doesn't care about recipes that vocabulary will be useless.

In my experience tutoring language, almost all the time even when I ask "so what do you want to learn?" the student has no clue haha. So I wouldn't worry about that too much (though maybe with Japanese, everyone wants to understand anime and manga).