I'd like to talk about my flatmate Kenji, who helped me prepare for the Japanese Language Proficiency Test when I was working in Osaka. I'm from Bangladesh and had moved there to work in a hotel, and I needed to pass the second-highest level to get promoted.
The exam was a big deal for me. It tests reading, grammar and listening, and the reading section in particular is famously difficult, with long, formal passages and a strict time limit. I'd failed it once already, and I had about four months before the next attempt.
Kenji isn't a teacher; he's a chef. But he's patient and he's a native speaker, so he offered to help. His approach was very practical. Every evening while he cooked, he'd talk to me only in formal Japanese, the kind used in news reports, rather than the casual language we normally used. He made me read one newspaper article a day and then explain it to him in my own words while he chopped vegetables. At weekends he'd time me on old practice papers and then go through every wrong answer, not just telling me the right one but asking why I'd chosen the wrong one. That was the most useful part, because I realised I kept falling for the same traps.
His help made a huge difference. I passed with a comfortable margin, and my reading score went up more than anything else. I got the promotion three months later. But I think the bigger effect was confidence. After four months of explaining newspaper articles to someone cooking dinner, the exam room felt almost relaxing. I still cook for him every Sunday as a thank-you.