Hello, this is Ako from Nihongo Picnic.
This month, Nihongo Picnic celebrated its 4th anniversary and officially entered its fifth year. To everyone who continues to support us, thank you, truly, from the bottom of our hearts.
At Nihongo Picnic, both our lessons and daily operations are conducted entirely online. Even as a team, we don’t often meet face-to-face. In 2025 especially, personal circumstances meant that the three of us worked together primarily online, with a handful of chances to meet in person.
Since the pandemic, many people, including myself, have continued to reflect on the advantages and challenges of remote work. But this past year, I found myself thinking about it more deeply than ever before.
I kept asking myself questions like:
How should we continue running this school?
How should we build relationships, with one another, and with our students, as we move forward?
The conclusion I arrived at is simple, but important to me:
What can be done online should be done in the best possible online form.
And what can only be done in person, we should do everything we can to make it happen face-to-face.
It may sound obvious, but pursuing this balance will be one of my key goals as a founder as we move into 2026.
Because Nihongo Picnic has already established itself as an online school and reached its fifth year, we feel ready to take the next step. In 2026, we will move toward a more intentional and refined hybrid approach, both online and in person.
🌐 Online
Online, we’ll continue to build on what we’ve learned and keep improving.
Maintaining the quality of our online lessons will remain our top priority.
We are developing new conversation materials for beginner to pre-intermediate levels, which we’ll share in the newsletter early next year.
For us, “online” has never meant just Zoom. We use tools like Slack and Google Drive to support natural communication, and we’ll be reviewing how we use these tools to see where we can improve.
We’ll revisit our student surveys to ensure they lead to clearer insights and meaningful improvements.
Information around cancellations, rescheduling, pauses, and withdrawals will be communicated even more clearly.
We are also planning online pilot lessons that will be open not only to Nihongo Picnic students, but to the wider public.
🤝 In-person
At the same time, we’ve already begun planning opportunities to connect face-to-face.
In January, we’ll hold an internal study session with Nihongo Picnic teachers in Kyushu.
Also in January, we are planning a collaborative event with a music school, an evening of music and craft beer for Nihongo Picnic students and teachers.
In March, we’ll host a Japanese-learning event in Tokyo that will be open to everyone. More details will be shared in a future newsletter.
Because Nihongo Picnic exists to support human connection through Japanese learning, we want to continue valuing those connections, both online and offline, more than ever as we move forward.
If you haven’t yet, we’d love for you to take another look at our newly redesigned website: https://www.nihongopicnic.com/
To our students and corporate partners, to everyone who works with Nihongo Picnic, and to the friends and family who continue to support us, thank you again, always.
We look forward to sharing our fifth year with you.
January 2025 - Ako, Chiharu, and Momo on our team trip in Kochi
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