The benefits of homeschooling are many. Educating your child at home certainly gives family more together time. Something that, more and more in these modern times has proven to be on decline. As child grows and moves into pre adolescent and teen years child feel closer to their parents and have security and confidence in a solid parent child relationship that will enhance child’s maturity level in this complex world.

As an at home teacher you’ll be directly in touch with areas that your child excels and those in which they don’t this will give you advantage of spending more time on areas that need more attention. In traditional classroom teacher has a fixed amount of time available to each are of study then they must move on. Learning at home gives child ability to fully master each subject before moving on giving them confidence to build on that they can learn difficult subjects for them.

This could be a person who is going to be living in Japan for a period of time, whether as a teacher or a businessperson, or someone who travels regularly to Japan for meetings.

If you are in this group, you should first master hiragana and katakana before you even start with any other aspect of language. Then, when you do begin, you can dive right into a "proper" Japanese textbook.

Hiragana and katakana are not at all difficult to learn. I learned them part-time in a couple of weeks. Even kanji can be learned fairly rapidly by a motivated and well-organized student with right tools.

2. The Hobbyist

Perhaps you don’t have a burning need to learn Japanese. You are doing it for pleasure, or because you are planning on visiting Japan.

If this is you, then your options are more varied. However, even in your situation, I would not suggest starting with a Romaji textbook. Instead, I would recommend you begin with spoken language. If you are wondering how you can do this if you are not in Japan, check out Pimsleur method. Sure, it is a little expensive even second-hand. The point is that you will be able to speak and understand enough for a short trip. Once you have completed course, you can then decide whether you wish to stop there, or continue studying in a more serious manner - in which case you then follow Serious Student method I mentioned before.

Learning to speak and listen will keep your language-learning fun, whilst not undermining any future serious study by getting you used to Romaji crutch.

So whatever your motivations are and whatever your needs, if you can avoid Romaji crutch, you will pick up language better and be well-placed to make rapid progress in future.

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