I have kept having personal Japanese Language lessons since I moved to Tokyo 3 years ago. During these 3 years, I experienced at least 5 different tutors, and all of them were personal contracts. Some of them were awesome and others were not so.
Among all of the five people, I was influenced most by I-san, a house wife in her 30s. She was teaching at a Japanese language school at the time, but seeking individual students at the same time for some financial reasons. Although she was teaching Japanese, she actually had a degree in English literature. Before she got married, she was working at an IT company as a systems engineer. Basically, she was extremely overqualified to be a Japanese teacher.
We were having a 2 hour lesson every week in Yokohama. Usually I would practice my pronunciation in the first hour and have free talk the rest of the time. Thanks to her evaluation, I was able to realize where I should try to improve. My biggest issue was foreign words, also known as Katakana words. It seems that most foreign people who can speak English have or had this problem because most of those words are similar with legit English counterparts, but totally different when trying to pronounce them.
Besides the pronunciation part, I think it was the free talk part that made the time with her special. Unlike most Japanese people around me, she taught me everything about the sophisticated part of Japanese society including how Japanese think and what I should do in certain situations. She also shared many stories with me such as her childhood, her life in the US and why she ended up being a Japanese teacher. These stories were precious considering that most Japanese people around me at the time weren’t willing to tell me about themselves.
After a year and a half, the 2 hour lesson every week in Yokohama was put to an end when I-san had to get ready to give birth. Besides, I was about to graduate from school. The contract would be seized inevitably because she couldn’t teach me on weekends anyway, which would be my only free time after graduation.
It was very clear to me that I would never meet another tutor like her. It was shame that we couldn’t share more time together. If we met at a different time and place, we could have been good friends.