Welcome to Takenoko!
Hello and welcome!
We’re the three co-founders of Takenoko, and while we each come from different professional and personal backgrounds, we share a surprising number of common threads.
If you were to create a word cloud to describe us, it might include things like:
lovers of cooking, dogs, and books; born in the Showa era; over 30 years of living in the U.S.; raising bilingual children; homeschooling; early childhood education; Montessori philosophy; language education; Japanese instruction at UNC; ESL teaching; and Chapel Hill school district interpreter.
Our experiences span many places, including Tokyo, Yokohama, North Carolina, Michigan, Philadelphia, the San Francisco Bay Area, and Singapore. Together, we bring a broad mix of backgrounds and perspectives to our work.
At Takenoko Japanese Language and Culture School, we teach Japanese language and culture every Saturday in Durham to children ages 3 to 18. About half of our students come from Japanese-speaking households, while the other half are learning Japanese as a foreign language.
Why did we start this school, and why do we serve such a wide age range? The answer lies in our own lived experiences. Opportunities to learn Japanese in U.S. public schools are limited—especially when it comes to reading and writing hiragana, katakana, and kanji, which require time, consistency, and guidance.
At the university level, we regularly teach true beginners starting with hiragana, but we often wish our students had built a stronger foundation earlier. With that foundation, learners can begin doing things in Japanese from the very first semester of college, making their language study far more meaningful and functional.
This approach is called task-based language learning, and it’s at the heart of what we do at Takenoko. Each week, children engage in age-appropriate, level-appropriate tasks using Japanese—not just “pretend play,” but real communication with clear purposes.
Our long-term goal is to help our students reach an intermediate college-level proficiency by the time they graduate high school, so that they can continue using Japanese meaningfully in higher education, in their careers, and in cross-cultural life.
Through this blog, we hope to share more about our classroom practices, our students, and language education more broadly.
Thank you for reading, and we look forward to connecting with you!
Makiko