Welcome to Hapa Eikaiwa Podcast with Jun Senesac Episode 254
What's going on everyone? Jun here with Hapa Eikaiwa. Today I have a
special guest on the show. His name is Atsu, and many of you may know him from
his popular YouTube channel Atsueigo. In today's interview Atsu
shares his key principles for learning English, his unorthodox study methods
common mistakes he sees Japanese people make when learning English, how being a
perfectionist has actually helped him become a proficient English speaker and
much much more. Without further ado please welcome
Atsu. What's up Atsu? Welcome to the show man.
Hey, how's it going?
I've gotta say man, I am
super super excited about this interview. Can you tell me about yourself, Atsu?
Sure. My name is Atsu and I'm the owner of Atsueigo which is an English
channel on YouTube. I was born and raised in Japan and I went to a university in
Japan and when I became the age of 22, I made a move to Australia to do a
master's degree in accounting because I wanted to specialise in accounting, and
after graduation in 2014 I moved to the city of Melbourne which is the city I'm
living in right now and I've worked for a company called Deloitte Touche
Tohmatsu which is one of the biggest accounting firms in the world as a
public accountant and I'm still here in Melbourne
You know, Deloitte is one of
the big fours that I was trying to get into when I was 21-22 years old you know
that was actually a dream of mine at the time I was working really hard in
college because back you know at my UCSB Santa Barbara days getting into the big
four was something that I was trying to accomplish. So it's kind of cool that
you're actually working there right now we
a bit of a connection right there, huh? I thought an interesting place to start
our interview today is about the story you shared with me.
Right, yeah, so to be honest with you right I had no interest in studying in general
until the age of like 17, until I became a second year student in high school and I was
actually trying to become a beautician just because I thought it was gonna be
kind of cool right if I could become a beautician and you know I didn't really
think really carefully, just being just a mere high school student I didn't really
think carefully about like what I really wanted to do in the future, but I don't
know why but my dad said that, my dad is such a quiet person to be honest but
like he just mentioned to me that he would give me a hundred thousand
Japanese yen if I, you know, get into the top ten students in my high school in
the upcoming end-term exam. And I was like I didn't really understand why he said
that but it was such a big incentive for me especially because you know a
hundred thousand Japanese yen is such a big amount of money and considering my
allowance was just like five thousand yen a month when I was a high school
student so like I was like "Oh this is just such a great once-in-a-lifetime
kind of opportunity I need to grasp" and I... That was a moment when I started
taking things really seriously when it comes to studies not because I wanted to
become a bright student or I was like attracted to an English subject or
whatsoever. I just wanted to get the money right and then I strategized
my plan and to make sure that I can actually achieve the goal within
the short period of time because I only had like two months to prepare
myself, and I think that was the time when
I also started thinking things, thinking about things like quite logically
because that's become kind of my current style to tackle
this language, English. So I was successfully able to become a top-ten student
thankfully, thanks to making a lot of effort and like I said strategizing
all the plans and tactics and then of course I got that 100,000 Japanese yen
but that wasn't really the end of the game because I felt like among all those
subjects that I had to study for like including history, mathematics, and so on
I thought English was like one of the most practical and useful subjects
that I could actually leverage in order to explore the future.
So how did you spend that 100,000 yen?
I bought some clothes, like expensive clothes
because I'm a big fan of clothes.
So you blew a hundred thousand yen on clothes?
Yep, pretty much.
With the process of learning English, what has been the biggest challenge for you?
That's a difficult question because I've never thought that there were like big
challenges in my journey. I'm a kind of person who takes things quite positively
so I don't think I've ever actually come across a big challenge but I think
generally speaking not being able to have an opportunity to speak English in
Japan tends to become a challenge for a typical english learner, but I think you
know now that the world has advanced technologically and there is so many
like services that you can use like a platform where you can have an online
english conversation lessons quite easily i think nowadays that
typical issue is gone, but i think to me at a time I think not being able to
find such an opportunity quite easily was sort of a challenge. But I think
that was it. I think it's just that at the end
of the day right it's just a matter of mentality, like if you take things
positively there will be less challenges in your journey and you can grow quite
rapidly thanks to that, so yeah. That's my view on that.
How did you overcome that?
I mean, obviously that is a big challenge and it is a big challenge to a lot of
people in Japan till this day even though you know with
the Skype and the internet becoming much more accessible to a lot of people to
communicate with people in the world. Obviously you know at the time you were
going to college maybe it wasn't as widespread to, you know, login to Skype and
connect with people, so how did you overcome that?
Actually there were
a couple things that I did but one of them was to speak English to myself all the time. So...