About a year ago, I raised my lesson prices.
 

I had good reasons. I was spending a great deal of time preparing individualized lessons, coaching students, and writing detailed feedback afterward. I wanted my prices to reflect that.
 

A year later, I still believe good teaching should be valued.
 

But I’ve also been thinking more carefully about your side of the equation.
 

The yen has weakened, prices in Japan have risen, and English lessons are one more expense competing with everything else. And a wonderful English lesson isn’t terribly useful if it becomes too expensive to take regularly.
 

So, after a lot of thought, I’ve decided to make another adjustment—this time in the other direction.
 

Effective October 1, I’ll be lowering the prices of many of my lessons.
 

Not dramatically. I’m afraid I haven’t completely lost my mind.
 

But enough, I hope, to make regular lessons a little easier—and to help those of you who want to study more consistently.
 

After thousands of lessons (4,4467 and counting!), one thing has become very clear to me: consistency matters enormously. I’d rather make it a little easier for you to study regularly than make every individual lesson a little more expensive.
 

For example:
 

30-minute English Conversation
2,600P → 2,400P
 

4-Lesson Conversation Pack
9,600P → 9,000P
 

5-Lesson Conversation Pack
11,500P → 11,000P
 

I’ll also be reducing the prices of several of my longer and customizable lessons.
 

Meanwhile, something else has changed: me.

Over the past year, I’ve spent quite a bit of time analyzing transcripts of my own lessons. I wanted to understand how I actually teach, rather than how I thought I taught.
 

I discovered that sometimes I was teaching English rather like an interview:
 

Manning asks a question → student answers → Manning asks another question → student answers → repeat until Zoom mercifully ends the meeting.
 

Perfectly respectable.
 

Also, occasionally, a little boring.
 

So I’ve been developing a different approach—and it has been an exciting discovery.
 

I still prepare carefully, but instead of marching through a script, I listen closely to your ideas and follow where they lead. We explore. We question. We challenge. We clarify. And we work on the English that naturally emerges along the way.
 

A little less interview.
A little more Socrates.
And increasingly, a little more jazz.
 

I prepare the structure. You bring the ideas. We improvise from there.
 

I’m calling it Manning 2.0: Jazz.
 

The results have been exciting. Students are talking more, thinking more deeply in English, and taking our conversations in directions I never could have planned.
 

And frankly, I’m having more fun too.
 

Apparently Manning 2.0 comes with two upgrades:
 

Better teaching.
Lower prices.
 

Possibly the first software upgrade in history to cost less.
 

Thank you, as always, for studying with me—and for helping me continue to become a better teacher.
 

The new prices take effect October 1.
 

I hope to see you soon.
 

Warm regards,
 

Manning