Luca Toma, the founder of Japanese Coaching, used to be a lecturer of Japanese and Italian at different European universities. Until he discovered language coaching and decided to quit his job as a 'traditional' teacher and work on his own as an online 'language coach'. His aim is to help learners of Japanese overcome stumbling blocks along the way and make progress in the language.
Luca is Italian, and he comes from Salento, southern Italy. He had a passion for foreign languages from an early age, especially for Japanese (mostly influenced by Japanese anime). He studied Japanese and Chinese at the University of Venice (Italy) and then moved to Tokyo where he lived for 10 years teaching Italian and English at two universities. He finally obtained an MA in Applied Linguistics & Language Pedagogy from London University (SOAS) and recently became a certified language coach.
Regarding his approach, he uses a new method called "Neurolanguage Coaching", 'neuro-' basically means: ‘brain-friendly way of learning’. It incorporates findings in neuroscience as well as tools from coaching into the traditional teaching process in order to help learners get the results they want rapidly and in a way that is fun and engaging. This is a one-to-one coaching process done via Skype with all of the call recordings provided making it easy for people to learn anytime and anywhere. Unlike traditional learning (such as in a classroom), this approach starts by setting specific targets, and then applies the best materials for the learner based on his/her interests.
Luca does not love Japanese only, but loves languages in general. He worked on French, Spanish and German on his own and he made good progress in a relatively short time. In an interview he did with Luca Lampariello, a very famous Italian polyglot, he says, "I did an Italian-Spanish exchange with a native speaker, took part in an English-Spanish meet-up group and started to watch Spanish TV after 3 months; started to read El País, books and magazines after six months… Basically, it is important to tackle the language from different angles and always choose pleasant and interesting activities."
To know more about Luca Toma, please visit his website:
http://www.japanesecoaching.net
Join his Facebook page 'Japanese Coaching' here:
https://www.facebook.com/japanesecoaching?fref=ts