About me

About me – Kazuo Udagawa

Kazuo Udagawa

I specialise in teaching Japanese to students with particular needs such as:

• business Japanese (from basic to highly advanced) in order to be able to communicate confidently with their Japanese counterparts in London and/or in Japan.
• passing and getting a good grade in Edexcel Japanese exams; also doing a retake when the students’ initial grade was D and for a student who found it difficult to learn grammar/vocab from conventional exercise books. Read how I taught Joseph to enable him to obtain A* in a re-take exam.
• urgent revision of his/her Japanese to prepare for higher grades in the Japanese Language Proficiency Test (JLPT)
  See how Liz passed JLPT N1.
• making an impressive speech in Japanese ・one student had to do this in his wedding ceremony and another wanted to learn how to persuade his girlfriend痴 father to allow him to marry her See what Time says about his marring to a Japanese lady.
• learning daily ordinary Japanese to talk to his/her Japanese family members/relatives.

All students can learn Japanese effectively with a method that is developed and tailored to their own requirements and study patterns.

I took a teacher-training course in Tokyo in 1987 before coming to England.

The emphasis on this training course was on Japanese verbs – ie to make sure that students had a very good understanding of verb conjugation, especially transitive verbs which can have 64 different patterns.

From 1989 to 1999, I was Head teacher at MOA Foundation in London and from 1991 to 1999 Head of MOA’s language schools in Europe.
At MOA I taught classes at all levels; organized several summer intensive courses in Japan, ran teacher-training courses in London, Brussels, Paris, Lisbon, and Los Angeles; supervised about 10 teachers in London; produced exams/teaching materials; gave advice to students, etc.

While I was at MOA,the Japan Foundation donated teaching materials to the value of £1,000 based on their assessment of the quality of the teaching. Unfortunately this office closed in 1999 due to the economic downturn in Japan.
Since then I have been self-employed.

The majority of my students are business people from financial institutions, law firms, marketing firms, etc.
I have taught Japanese GCSE, AS and A2 in a sixth-form college in Earls Court.
One of these students was a girl who suffers from dyslexia , but she was amazed to find she could pronounce the 107 sounds during the very first lesson and was able to read/write Japanese letters within several months.
She participated in the Japan Foundation speech contest in 2004.

A number of my students have one Japanese and one non-Japanese parent – they decided to learn because they realized they regretted not doing so when they were younger.In 2005, I helped to organize a 6-day homestay in Osaka for 14 students from Greenland. These students from WWEP (Window to the World Exchange Programme) were auditioned and selected to introduce Greenlandic culture to Japanese people and they performed a half-hour cultural show in one of the schools in the city .

What I have learned over these years is how important it is to plan each lesson in a coherent/logical manner so that students learn each component step by step, with the appropriate level of academic pressure and so that they have a sense of achievement.