Featured Student of the Week: Tyler Sylvester
By Sarah Eckert | 2-minute read
Tyler Sylvester works for a Japanese company called Yokohama Tires. Currently, he is the national account manager for major corporate accounts in the United States, but his ambitions lie internationally. His dream would be to relocate to Japan, even if only for a year or two, with his wife and two year old daughter. Yokohama Tires is paying for Tyler’s Japanese lessons through the Bend Language Institute to help him advance his career. For the past six months, he has been taking online private tutoring classes with Naoko Gamble, whom he finds to be friendly and a great teacher.
With his busy schedule including lots of travel, Tyler is grateful for the option of online classes through BLI. He found the Institute through good old-fashioned word of mouth. One evening at a Bento restaurant in Southeast Bend, he noticed that the front desk host was American but spoke what sounded to him like fluent Japanese. When he asked her about it, she said she studied with BLI, so Tyler looked them up and the rest is history.
A few months ago, Tyler had the opportunity to travel to his company’s headquarters in Yokohama, Japan. He was happily surprised by how well he was able to communicate with the language skills he’d acquired through his BLI lessons so far. He could tell that the executives appreciated that he was putting in the effort to speak with them in Japanese. He found the experience to be both intimidating and gratifying. Most of all, he says it was extremely helpful in advancing his learning.
The greatest challenge, Tyler says, is that Japanese is a difficult language to learn. It is not Latin-based and has a completely different alphabet, so beginning the process really felt like starting from scratch. His only other experience with language learning was taking required language classes in high school. He chose French but did not really have any desire to learn it. Now, as an adult language learner, he feels that he has a deeper appreciation for it and is able to apply himself fully to the time-consuming, energy intensive process of learning Japanese because he genuinely wants to.
To immerse himself in the language beyond his lessons, he listens to Japanese music and watches Japanese television in his spare time. This is something he would advise all language learners to do: surround yourself with the language as much as possible. He also wishes to share the immense amount of patience that is required when learning a new language. “It is more than just deciding you want to learn it,” he says. “It takes a lot of effort and requires you to give the language the respect it deserves if you want to make genuine progress.” Tyler says that learning Japanese is one of the hardest things he has ever done. He has had moments of immense joy and also moments that made him question his progress. Overall, he is committed to the challenge and plans to continue learning far into the future.
Best of luck, Tyler! We hope there are many more Japan trips in your future!
