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...