NihongoPicnic & Bunpro Collaboration

Bunpro
#1

We are excited to announce that Bunpro is collaborating with NihongoPicnic!

What does that mean?

  • Students of NihongoPicnic will get free access to Bunpro for the duration of their lessons.

    • New and existing students will be able to request free access to Bunpro.
    • If you are already a Bunpro subscriber you can request a partial refund for your current subscription or an extension of the subscription period.

  • Teachers at NihongoPicnic will get access to Bunpro’s recently developed Teacher Dashboard.

    • Teachers will have access to data and insights that wouldn’t normally be attainable in a traditional classroom setting on both a class-wide and individual level, allowing them to tailor their lesson to the needs of their students.
    • Teachers will be able to assign grammar to students to be studied outside of class, allowing students to maximize the value of their in class time.

About NihongoPicnic

Founded by Ako 先生, a veteran with 20 years of Japanese teaching experience, NihongoPicnic is an online Japanese school that strives to create a Japanese learning environment where classmates from different backgrounds and lifestyles can encourage each other in a positive manner.

All of their instructors are certified in Japanese education. Furthermore, their group lessons are given by instructors who are trained in group facilitation, helping support smooth in class discussions and conversations.

They have a ton of different courses for learners at all different levels. They offer the following conversation focused courses:
・Starter
・Beginner 1
・Beginner 2
・Pre-intermediate
・Intermediate
・High-intermediate
・High-intermediate for Games and Tech
・Advanced

They also offer JLPT N3 and N2 courses (the N2 course is full but there are still spots left for the N3 one!) and they are currently working on a kanji course as well.

Why collaborate with NihongoPicnic?

In the past, members of the team here at Bunpro have actually taken courses with Ako 先生. Our personal experiences under her tutelage make us both highly confident in recommending her to you and also extremely proud to be working with her and the team at NihongoPicnic!

One of our guiding philosophies is to not only make learning Japanese easier, but also trying to make powerful tools like Bunpro more accessible to learners everywhere. Even though Japanese has a reputation for being really hard to learn, it can be a rewarding and life changing experience, one we are working to make available to anyone wishing to pursue it.

Ako 先生 and the teachers at NihongoPicnic share a similar philosophy, and their work to reduce the barriers around learning Japanese has helped thousands of students build confidence in their language ability. Together we hope to continue to foster environments where students can build a solid foundation that they can add to, brick by brick, as they work their way toward fluency.

You can check out their website and their courses in more detail here: https://nihongopicnic.com/ for more information!

16 Likes
#2

This is great news, congrats on the collaboration, am certain both sides will profit from that! :+1:

Sadly I cant afford 300€ for a 12 lesson conversation practice as of now, even though this is my weakest or rather nearly non-existent skill/area by far, but others might be able to afford it and profit immensely, their site looks very neat :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:

4 Likes
#3

Any benefit for bunpro lifetimer on NihongoPicnic?

5 Likes
#4

I figured that name sounded oddly familiar! I’ve listened to a couple of her podcast episodes before where it’s themed listening episodes divided by skill levels. All the episodes are still on there (spotify, etc.) if anyone’s curious, it’s called 日本語 with あこ.

It’s really cool and neat to see people creating language learning opportunities like this, especially in a group environment. I’ve done language schools (fun times haha) and also private tutoring lessons in another language and the two methods really do hit you differently. I always thought I’d like 1-on-1s more but seeing others succeed and fail during conversations allowed me to end up learning a ton more. As long as the group size isn’t extremely huge, it’s a fun way to learn. Plus, I still keep in touch with some of the peeps I studied with 12+ years ago which is a blast.

The japanese teaching and studying community continues to really set the bar for how languages should be framed IMO. Schools in the past just had generic group lessons, but now we’re seeing targeted lessons to help reinforce certain points, which isn’t a super common thing in most other languages. I’ll always cheer on people taking chances and creating new businesses, hoping for nothing but the best for Nihongopicnic!

3 Likes
#5

Unfortunately we don’t have anything specific right now. This is a similar challenge we are facing as we plan a referral system that you can earn subscription time for.

The best we have come up with is the ability to gift accrued time to a friend/family member or to redeem it for a discount on the Bunpro merch store (when that comes around).

I would love to hear any thoughts you might have around it. I am sure there is something that we haven’t thought of yet.

4 Likes
#6

I don’t know either. :confused:
I would have liked a coupon on NihongoPicnic but I understand that the partnership is on the other direction.

4 Likes
#7

This is the first time I’ve heard about this site. I just looked at them and they seem really good! Good luck with the collaboration!

4 Likes
#8

I’m interested in signing up for this, but the JLPT course in particular has a hefty hefty price tag. Has anyone else had experience with taking a full course from NihongoPicnic? Or is there an example of their teaching style available?

1 Like
#9

I’ve personally met Ako先生。While not a full course, I did attend to a small workshop that lasted about 4 hours. It was really cool!

The workshop revolved around reading 岩田聡はこんなことを話していた, a book about Satoru Iwata’s (former Nintendo president, passed away in 2015 due to illness) life from the perspective of others and their experiences with him, and Japanese slang.

Ako先生 would first give us a small batch of vocab and grammar points that were all N4 or N5 level. Then proceeded to make sure everyone understood what they meant and what they were by providing examples and explanations. She encouraged us to always speak in Japanese, however broken. She never stopped speaking in Japanese to us.

Next, she would show an extract from the book that used the vocab and grammar we had just reviewed and asked us to read it. It was super empowering to read an actual Japanese text from a Japanese book. These extracts were of course handpicked, but they really did leave a strong impression on us. I’m working solo through that book right now.

After 3 to 4 rounds of this, we then proceeded to some Twitter specific lingo. She would pull up Japanese tweets and teach us the grammar or context behind them. Pretty much “N0” stuff so lots of slang and the like. The ones I remember the most are FF外から失礼します (Lit. “Sorry for intruding from outside your followers” before commenting on a thread from someone you don’t follow) and all the game abbreviations such as モンスターハンター to モンハン and the like.

She never spoke English during the entire lesson, if you asked her a question in English she would reply to you in Japanese.

At the end, she handed out some stickers from an artist friend of hers, and hanged around to chat with the students.

Ever since I’ve wanted to join a full course with her. The only problem is that with time zone differences, I’d wind up needing to get at like 3 to 5 am in the morning. I am an early riser but that’s just too much. :rofl:

6 Likes
#10

If you don’t mind, can you go into a bit more detail about the class environment aspect of the workshop? I know workshops and courses will differ slightly, but I’m curious about how students and teachers synced together. Did you find yourself learning from what others were asking, conversing with other students, any feelings like your questions, etc. weren’t being met (due to not being solo), yadada. Thanks!

1 Like