Yay, it’s analogy time!

Ok, let’s say you bought the hottest and coolest RGP such as Final Fantasy Millennium or Dragon Quest MMMCMXLIX but the game designers got a little too creative. The game is supposed to take 70-100 hours to beat but it’s networked and you play with 19 other people. The only catch is, you only get to play a couple minutes at a time. The rest of the time you’re watching the other 18 people take turns playing exactly same thing. Now, lets say the game was something else like Final Fantasy 8-2 and it’s not that much fun to begin with. And you don’t even get to play that much because 80% of the game is filled with cut scenes that are kind of boring and lecturing. To further spice it up, let’s say the game is supposed to take several years to finish. Congratulations, you’ve decided to take Japanese language classes!

Here’s another analogy. Let’s say you throw that game out the window and buy another one that lets you play all the time by yourself. Awesome! But you find out that the game has a critical bug of never saving your progress correctly. Every time you start playing, you start off at random parts of the game. So most of the time you either have to repeat what you did already or you’re completely lost. The gameplay is also really complicated and there’s no instructions anywhere of how to play. The only way to get any information is to meet up with experts that know the game backwards and forwards. The only problem is that these experts have been playing this game ever since they were a child. It’s so natural to them, they don’t really know how to explain it very well. Also, there’s so much new terminology, you can’t even understand what they’re saying half the time. Congratulations, you’ve decided to study Japanese on your own while meeting up with native speakers!

Why are you messing with that crap? Don’t you want a game that remembers how much you’ve progressed, challenges you at the right level, and can explain to you what required step-by-step as you go? That’s right, you want to partner with a private tutor that knows the language, how to learn the language, and how much you know. So go ahead and send me an email. 🙂

No responses yet for my tutoring services despite the ultra-low rate I set (on purpose). According to google analytics, I’ve only had about 50 visitors from Seattle in total to my website after the announcement so this is hardly surprising. Searching google for “seattle japanese private lessons” showed my site at #19 which means it might as well not even be there. You either want to be within the first 3 or #10 which is first on the second page.

So I can either be patient or expand my audience. As I briefly mentioned, I really prefer live meetings over online for a variety of reasons. And by “live” I don’t mean some kind of lame marketing term (*cough* Microsoft *cough*) but the technology platform often referred to in layman terms as “real life”.

Learning language is an interactive process. Personally, I think there’s a huge problem if the speaking ratio between the teacher and student is not near 50%. Unfortunately, almost all language classes consist of the teacher speaking 80%+ percent of the time depending on the class size which is partly the reason why they are so ineffective. So in order to interact with the student, I need a medium where communication can easily flow both ways.

Let’s see if modern technology can work out something for me. I prefer meeting face-to-face because seeing a person’s face and body language is important in language and communication. This is especially important for teaching languages for obvious reasons and is very important to the learning process in conversation practice.

Well, while I haven’t tried it yet, I’ve got a webcam on my monitor so I guess that’s a potentially reasonable solution. I look crazy when I see myself via the webcam but maybe that’s just how I always look. (A scary thought.) So I’ve significantly increased my audience to anybody in the world with a fast internet connection and a webcam of reasonable quality.

Another advantage of real life is that it’s trivially easy to show and share information. All you need is a pen and paper and you could easily write things out, point at them as you explain, and have the other person interact with it in kind. You can even bring your laptop and easily share websites and all sorts of stuff with virtually no hassle.

While I would prefer we write things by hand for kanji and kana writing exercise, I’m willing to compromise with the keyboard if I can share my computer screen somehow with the other person. I know Skype has built-in chat but I really need something where I can point to other stuff to show what I’m talking about and have the other person do the same while adding their own input. While I prefer my hands, I guess a mouse cursor can work. I don’t mind installing an app but would prefer the other person not have to do the same. Hopefully something integrated with the browser.

If I can find such a solution, I’m willing to open up my services to anybody with a webcam and fast internet connection. I might have to beef up my internet connection as well. And I suppose I’ll need to figure something out with Paypal, Google Checkout, or some service of that nature.