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The original was posted on /r/learnjapanese by /u/BlauAmeise on 2025-10-20 18:24:17+00:00.

Hey everyone, first of all, this post is not for me, but for my current client. I am fluent in Japanese and teach lessons as a side hustle.

I currently have a 52 year old client who is running his own business and wants to study Japanese to connect with Japanese businessmen and also because he does Japanese martial arts and his master is a Tokyo resident and he plans to visit him asap.

My problem is, he is struggling. A lot. He has no prior language learning experience apart from English in school and that’s it. He also says that he is too busy with his business to study at home or do exercises. I have started with introducing the hiragana. The first few lessons he did the writing exercises in his exercise book and I always gave him example words on top. I then introduced dakuten/handakuten and chiisai tsu/ya/yu/yo and he admitted to me that these were the most difficult lessons he had and he doesn’t understand anything at all. I gave him a cheat sheet that he uses a lot to double check but sometimes he just fails to recognise that he has to apply this to a word or he doesn’t know for example that ka -> becomes ga.

We have been at 12 hours now and writing a single word takes him 5 minutes or more because he looks through the entire hiragana chart and is hunting for the right kana and he feels very frustrated.

In our last lesson I tried giving him a very short conversation as reading exercise and he openly admitted to me that if I wouldn’t have been there, he would have quit after a minute because it’s too complicated for him and he is too frustrated to do it.

I decided to give him the vocabulary in advance and let him write it down in both hiragana+romaji. Then I suggested that instead of always looking character for character in the hiragana chart to look at the vocab that we just learned and see if he finds it again in the text and remember the hiragana better that way. But again, he kept searching character for character in the chart.

He indirectly pretty much told me he is frustrated with this and it’s too difficult for him and no fun anymore. I am really frustrated too because I already try to break it down as much as I can and I started introducing grammar in romaji first so that he has some feeling of success but we really need to do writing+reading every lesson or he is never gonna learn it and then it all goes downhill again. It pains me to see him so frustrated and I never had a client that needed so many lessons learning hiragana. I am gonna show him how to install anki on his phone but I don’t know if he will use it and if it will help.

Does anyone have some advice what I can do better/how I can make it less frustrating for him? It pains me to see my client like this and I would like to give him a feeling of success again!