My 40 Week (160+ Hour) Review of Studying Japanese on Preply - An Online Language Tutoring Service

(This is a review of a service I’ve been paying to use for 40 straight weeks, if you want to try it out you can use this referral link and save 70% off your first lesson, and I get some free lesson money also, or just go to Preply.com if you’d rather not)

I’ve always had a strong interest in Japan, Japanese Culture, and Japanese Language. I studied Japanese in college for a year, and then in 2006-2007 I studied abroad in Japan at a Japanese Language School in Tokyo. I learned a ton. Five days a week, three hours a day, and immersed physically in the people/language/country.

In nine months abroad my language skills had grown an incredible amount. I took the official Japanese Language Proficiency Test (JLPT) and passed multiple levels year after year without difficulty. But eventually I met my match, and failed to pass the second hardest level (N2) for two years in a row.

I convinced myself that it would not be possible to gain the proficiency I needed in Japanese to pass the N2 exam outside of going back to Japan. Of course, many people do this every year without going to Japan, but no need to let reality interfere with my internal monologue. So for many years I basically gave up studying Japanese. I’d occasionally study for a few days or weeks, but would ultimately drop it again. With a family and work, I saw no real way to get back to achieving this goal.

Then in 2020, with so many things going remote/online, I had a very belated thought, “Hey, I bet you can find one-on-one online language tutoring”. I can’t believe I didn’t think of this before! So I started searching through the various language tutoring websites. I eventually settled on trying out Preply.

One of the biggest factors that drew me to Preply is the large number of tutors, with varying degrees of teaching experience and resources. Some tutors use a very informal structure, and you decide what to discuss/study as you go along. Others are more regimented, and you use a textbook, etc… Some tutors have very specific skill sets, like company executive experience. But the most important initial factor for me was whether they were a native speaker of Japanese or not.  (Preply is in no way limited to Japanese, there are a ton of language options.) The second most important factor to me was price. I decided I wanted to get a large quantity of face to face time with a native speaker who can actively correct my Japanese. I filtered to tutors charging $12/hr or less.

I have a tendency, a desire to break past the pay-to-play/advertising that many companies use. With Preply you can pay to show up higher in the search results as a sort of promoted listing. So I went all the way to the last page of the results, and started reading bios and watching introduction videos (every tutor has a self introduction video).

I tried trial lessons with three different tutors, and eventually settled on two. I don’t know how common it is to have more than one tutor, but I really enjoyed having two different perspectives. In my case one is a mid-20’s women working at an American company, and the other is a retired 70’s man who used to work in computers and loves science and technology. Both live in Japan and were mostly stuck at home due to the pandemic.

We spent tons of time in conversation practice, and I would frequently read news articles in Japanese and we would discuss them.  I also regularly wrote short essays in Japanese and then would fix the grammar and structure with a native speaker at my side.

Over the many years that I was not using my Japanese it had degraded heavily, and I had lost a lot of vocabulary and confidence. The last 40 weeks I’ve been spending four hours face to face in one-on-one tutoring sessions every week, and it has helped tremendously to both restore me back to where I was originally when I came back from Japan, and even push my conversation skills past where they used to be. My grammar and writing skills have also improved a lot.

But sometimes what you need is a teacher that will teach the test. Passing the JLPT N2 is hard, only about 44% of people pass it each year. So while I’ve been loving the conversation practice and working on my writing, I also really want to pass the test. The truth is most tutors on Preply have a very busy life outside of their side tutoring job, and making lesson plans, reading textbooks and helping guide you towards your very specific goal is beyond the scope of what they’ve signed up for. There are tutors, much more expensive ones than I was using, who may very well provide these sorts of options.

So with this in mind I’ve mostly moved on from Preply. I’m still keeping one hour a week, because I just have so much fun chatting with the ~70 year old about tech topics, but for the most part I’m spending my time with a different Japanese Language teaching company that has built a specific lesson plan to help me pass the test.

I don't have experience using Preply to learn a language from scratch. But what I can say is I would strongly recommend Preply for those who have already learned some of a foreign language in the past and are looking for an easy way to practice it with a native speaker. There are lots of tutors with a wide variety of availability throughout the day or week. If you are interested, give it a try!