The idea for this site came from a peculiar behavior we’ve noticed on similar sites that enable foreign language conversation practice. On such sites you’ll frequently find a range of hourly rates people charge for conversation practice sessions. You’ll also find the native speakers have a broad range of qualifications, some with no experience at all and some with advanced degrees and significant teaching experience. You’d think price would correlate with experience and qualifications, and in some cases it does. However, there are other cases where you’ll see someone with no qualifications charging an outrageously high rate and getting tons of students. In such cases it tends to be someone who is very attractive, who then has to make a point of saying “I’m only here for helping with language practice.” Based on this experience, we’ve concluded a few things. There are students who want to practice conversation with native speakers they find attractive. There are native speakers who are perfectly fine with that, as long as the student understands the relationship is only about language learning. We have no problem with any of the above and believe it is better to just be up front about it so all parties can have a common set of ground rules. So, our teachers and trainers can present themselves however they want and students can choose who they want to learn from based on whatever criteria they choose, be it qualifications, their fechi, or some combination of the two. What we all must agree is that this site is primarily about language learning and all behavior will be proper and professional, no different than if you were in a more traditional learning environment.
There are three main roles people play in our Japanese learning system: students, teachers, and trainers. Students are pretty self-explanatory, they are the people learning Japanese. Teachers and trainers both play a role in helping students learn Japanese: teachers teach and develop learning content, while trainers help students practice what they’ve learned.
We are currently in the initial stages of developing this site so currently students have only one thing they can do: meet online with trainers to practice speaking Japanese. We are working on courses and teacher-led online classes students can use to learn Japanese. Given our current status, this site is best suited for intermediate to advanced Japanese learners who can carry on at least a basic conversation with trainers.
Teachers teach new concepts to students and ensure they have a solid understanding of Japanese language fundamentals. They might do this by developing course materials or teaching online classes. Teachers may be native Japanese speakers but they don’t have to be. They must, however, speak the language of their students. They are likely to have some training as teachers, and may have some qualifications or certifications, but neither are required as we believe great teachers can flourish without such things.
The primary role of trainers is to help students practice Japanese. Since their main activity is speaking Japanese with students, they must be native Japanese speakers. However, trainers do not need to speak the languages of their students. Trainers meet online with students and do one of three things: (1) free talk, where the trainer and student just try to have natural conversations, (2) targeted reviews, where they focus on helping students practice a specific lesson or concept, or (3) general reviews, where they validate continued competency in many different lessons or concepts the student has learned.
This is a site for serious language learners. Many similar websites have free student memberships but with “free” sometimes comes “undesirable” and the more users the website has, the more difficult it is to manage. On a site like ours, free student memberships would mean a lot of people just browsing for the fun of it, voyeurs of sort, that never end up purchasing any services (which of course is necessary to cover our expenses). We want to limit our student users to those who are very serious about learning with our system. On this site that means booking ongoing sessions with trainers. The amount we charge is meant to discourage non-serious student users while not being a burden to serious ones. Our current price is more than most browsing voyeurs are willing to pay and negligeable compared to typical amounts spent with trainers.
Some trainers may occasionally think “I’m doing all the work here, so why am I giving up a percentage of my income?” Indeed, the trainer’s work is essential. It is the heart of our service, takes a lot of hard work, and is highly valued by us. However, the reality is we do a huge amount of work to enable those trainer sessions. We develop this site, including ongoing feature updates and maintenance, and pay for many expenses such as servers, bandwidth, advertising, recruiting, and the list goes on. There are also ongoing credit card processing fees for each training session that come out of our share but actually go to the card processing company. Our goal is to take a reasonable percentage of training session revenue that is representative of our contribution to making the sessions possible. What we can also share is that this site is built by an extremely motivated and passionate Japanese student. There are no investors or corporate salaries to pay so we’re doing our best to keep the payment arrangements fair and reasonable.