Hi! I'm Ryo from Osaka, Japan🇯🇵🗾🍣🍶⛩. After living in 3 different countries (🇺🇸🇳🇿🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿) and being away from Japan for about 4 years, I finally came back to my beloved Osaka in Feb 2019. Although I’m a little busy trying to attune myself to a normal life here, I’d love to meet travellers coming to Osaka and share our experiences. I’m a language teacher and taught English at high school and language school in Japan for two years, and taught Japanese at university in Ohio, US🇺🇸 for a year and at the embassy in Wellington, NZ🇳🇿 for several months. Also, I took my master’s degree in Language Teaching in Scotland 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿. So as you can see, my passion is education and language teaching! It’s my real vocation and I have a sense of life mission in it. Besides, I love travelling (more specifically I like staying out of my comfort zone and getting lost), and I have been to a great number of cities in the world 🗺 (North America, Oceania, Southeast Asia, Europe, Northern Africa and Middle East ) and met so many nice and thoughtful people all over the world. And I’m here on CS to meet as many new and lovely people as I can! If you want to know what I am like, here’s my Instagram📷 → ry0.f

Why I’m on Couchsurfing

I'm on Couchsurfing to meet new people all over the world. I’d love to learn different culture and languages, to be more open-minded and want to teach Japanese culture and language if you’d like 😆

Interests

I love both playing and watching sports. I played rugby 🏉 for 12 years and football ⚽️ for 3 years. I also love learning new languages, talking about different ways of communication, thinking, behaviours and things like that. I’m also interested in sociolinguistics/ applied linguistics (well... my master’s dissertation was about Japanese language maintenance and loss for Japanese-English bilinguals. Sorry if it doesn’t sound interesting to you...). And I am a teacher, so having a chat about general education, language education is a bliss to me!

• culture
• books
• photography
• education
• wine
• beer
• coffee
• japanese food
• running
• drinking
• traveling
• socializing
• backpacking
• sports
• rugby
• teaching
• languages
• philosophy
• sociology
• language exchange
• solo travel
• nature
• linguistics
• football
• learning languages
• manga
• knowledge
• landscapes
• culture exchange
• teacher
• language teaching
• sociolinguistics
• applied linguistics

One Amazing Thing I’ve Done

3-month backpacking🎒to New Zealand, Australia, Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Myanmar, Lao, Cambodia and Vietnam in 2017 🌏

Or 6-month backpacking to Portugal, Spain, Italy, France, Tunisia, Belgium, Netherlands, Germany, Ukraine, Poland, Czech Republic, Austria, Slovakia, Hungary, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Bulgaria, Turkey, Israel, Palestine, Jordan and Egypt in 2018/2019 🌍

Teach, Learn, Share

Japanese language! Japanese culture!
And my (crazy and stupid) travel experience if you wanna hear about it...

What I Can Share with Hosts

•Japanese language and culture (especially things about Osaka and western part of Japan). •Anything related to Japan. •Language teaching and sociolinguistics, Applied Linguistics (if you like something academic). •Travel experience (more than 40 countries/150 places). •If you can host or meet me and plan to come to Osaka or neighbouring cities in Japan, I’ll try to host you and/ or show you around if my work schedule permits!

Countries I’ve Visited

Australia, Austria, Belgium, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Cambodia, Canada, Croatia, Czech Republic, Egypt, England, France, Germany, Hungary, Indonesia, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Jordan, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Netherlands, New Caledonia, New Zealand, Northern Ireland, Palestine, Poland, Portugal, Scotland, Serbia, Singapore, Slovakia, Spain, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Tunisia, Turkey, Ukraine, United Kingdom, United States, Vatican City State, Viet Nam

Countries I’ve Lived In

Japan, New Zealand, Scotland, United States