IB Diploma · Years 12-13
IB Japanese tutors
Language B at SL or HL, with HL adding literary texts. Listening is usually the slowest skill to build and the one students leave latest, despite carrying equal weight with the others in the final assessment.
- USD 30-36 per hour
- One-to-one, online
- Free 1-hour trial class
What IB Diploma actually demands
Six subjects plus Theory of Knowledge, the Extended Essay and CAS. The workload is the defining feature, and the Internal Assessments, coursework worth a substantial share of each subject grade, are what most often slip.
Three scripts, a grammar that inverts English word order, and a politeness system woven through every sentence. The grammar is highly regular, which makes it very learnable with structure and slow without it.
Where IB Japanese students lose marks
- Kanji learned in isolation rather than through compounds and readings, so recall does not scale
- Particles chosen by feel, which changes the meaning of the sentence
- Politeness levels mixed within a single piece of writing
- Listening left until last, despite being the slowest skill to build
Is this the right subject at this level?
Students taking Japanese at school or preparing for JLPT or study in Japan, and self-taught learners who have plateaued because kanji was never systematised. It suits people who can commit to steady daily work, since the writing system rewards consistency far more than intensity.
What it costs
USD 30-36 per 60-minute one-to-one lesson at IB Diploma, the same rate in every city we teach in. Billed monthly against lessons actually taught, with no prepaid blocks and no minimum commitment.
Paired lessons (2 students) are USD 21-25 per student. Small group lessons (up to 6 students) are USD 15-18 per student. What each format is good for is here.
How we teach it
One-to-one, online, with a shared whiteboard. The first thing we establish is the exact syllabus the student is entered for: schools do not always publish the version they actually enter, and preparing for the wrong paper structure wastes a term.
After that the work is diagnostic: a past paper under timed conditions, marked together against the published scheme, to find out where the marks are genuinely going. That is almost always more useful than covering the syllabus again more slowly. The full process is here.
Japanese: questions parents ask
How much of the difficulty is the writing system?
A great deal of it early on. Three scripts have to be managed at once, and kanji in particular determines whether the final year is feasible. A systematic approach from the beginning matters more in Japanese than in almost any other language.
Why do particles cause so many errors?
Because they are chosen by feel rather than by rule, and the wrong particle changes the meaning rather than merely sounding odd. Learning them explicitly, with contrasting examples, resolves most of it.
Does politeness level affect marks?
Yes. Mixing politeness levels within a single piece of writing is a visible error to an examiner, and consistency is part of what is being assessed.