My uni year starts at the end of February, and between now and then, I will have finished (or almost finished) my goal of completing JFE and DOBJG. By complete I mean adding sentences to anki which enable me to learn and understand everything these books teach. I have been playing around with the idea of casually tutoring students (high school level) who are studying Japanese. I just want some opinion on whether mastering the content in JFE and DOBJG is actually enough to be able to advertise as a "casual tutor for beginner level students".

On another note, does 'tutoring' mean that they bring in work and you help them through it, or does it mean that you have to teach them new things each class?

Thanks if you can help with these questions.

What tutoring entails really depends upon the situation, but when the tutor is not being paid usually you'll just be helping them with whatever they bring in and need help on. With school tutors that involves helping them with whatever they're learning in their classes.

If you're just looking to tutor students in elementary Japanese at your school, then having a firm grasp on the material and being able to explain things well is more than enough. But if you plan on doing private tutoring and earning money off of it, then a lot of your prospective students will likely be expecting higher credentials.

If you feel like you can teach beginners well though, then there's certainly nothing to lose, and you might as well advertise for it

Thanks for the pointers, Aijin I'll give it a shot advertising once uni starts, and I'll cross my fingers I get at least one student I'm guessing $10/hr is an acceptable rate for someone with absolutely no qualifications, so I'll give that a try.

Six weeks seems to be a waste of energy and time. If you are wanting to do this for extra cash throughout your time at university, here are some tips I learned with my private students:

You need a long-term lesson plan set up for at least 20 sessions. $10/lesson is a good introductory rate while you fine-tune your teaching skills. Advertise this $10/lesson as a introductory offer for maybe three months. After that, you will want to increase your rates to maybe $30/lesson or $20/lesson for students paying for several lessons up front. Use note paper during the lesson to give them something that they can review after the lesson, and more importantly have something tangible to reflect on whether or not it was worth the fee you charged.

I used to do this in high school to supplement my income with the kids in math classes. Since I had done quite well in math, and knew exactly how the material was taught it was easy for me to tutor kids that were having trouble in these classes.

The main thing that you need to make sure of, is that the exact material being covered is what you know, if they start having questions outside of your knowledge, they might start wondering if it's worth the fee. Since kids never have questions outside the scope of the math being taught ( or it's close enough that it's easy for me to explain ) this wasn't a problem.

As bodhisama pointed out, a long term study plan would be very beneficial, you take control of the material being taught, to avoid the outside questions that you may not actually know.

I was at 10 bucks an hour at that point too, was good high school money considering I worked part time too

I'll try to get a hold of the Japanese syllabus for my area and make sure I cover everything in that. It will probably be messy at first - I won't get through everything I want to in one lesson, or they will keep forgetting kanji and I'll have to stop myself throwing a copy of RTK at them. But I'll figure it out along the way. Thanks for all your tips!

vinniram Wrote:I'll try to get a hold of the Japanese syllabus for my area and make sure I cover everything in that. It will probably be messy at first - I won't get through everything I want to in one lesson, or they will keep forgetting kanji and I'll have to stop myself throwing a copy of RTK at them. But I'll figure it out along the way. Thanks for all your tips!

If you're teaching ones enrolled in classes then DBJG should cover all the material in their elementary classes, but once you find out what textbooks they're using you can always check to make sure.

For students not enrolled in classes, what a lot of tutors will do is not have them use any textbook, but give them material each week to work on, so that the student feels dependent upon the tutor for learning more. Basically quite a few tutors are afraid that students will realize they can just learn from the textbook itself and not spend money on a tutor, and then quite taking lessons. But it's always seemed like a dishonest strategy to me.