I'm Justin. I love languages and I love people. I help people have joy and success in learning and teaching languages. The absence of joy and success from most language learning attempts is a big part of what motivates me as a teacher and trainer.
I learn languages myself, too. Some of my earliest memories from growing up in Vienna, Austria, include deciphering the Cyrillic alphabet to study Bulgarian maps, learning the Yugoslavian word for peanut butter, and making friends in pickup soccer games where every one of us had a different first language.
I've gotten to help people of all ages learn languages in schools, summer programs, and communities, both in person and online. I’ve also taught guitar and literature and coached soccer, and I study and teach a style of Japanese jujutsu called Hakko Denshin Ryu.
Having enjoyed a combined twelve years in Vancouver, British Columbia, and Los Angeles, California, I now live in Ann Arbor, Michigan, but spend much of the year trotting the globe to train and support teachers and help schools, districts, publishers, software developers, travel companies, and non-profit organizations do their work even better. My training and consulting experience in the United States ranges from small liberal arts colleges and Ivy League universities to huge state universities, and from storied K-12 private schools to the poorest districts in the country.
You can get a lot of my ideas about language learning and teaching by reading the blog. You'll see that, on the teaching side, I especially like repeatable tasks and interactions that provide a lot of language-learning payoff with little or no prep. On the learning side, I'm really into habits and hacks that make it easier for normal people with normal schedules to live in a language. I’d love for you to leave a comment on a post or drop me a note!
