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Based on the page http://www.snowjapan.com/e/resorts/nozawa-ski-school.html I booked a 2-day trip to Nozawa Onsen. A workmate went at new year and got ski lessons in English (from a Japanese instructor) as part of the public group lesson for 4,000 Yen per day. I emailed nozawa ski school and this was part of the reply:

"While we have general Snowboarding lessons, they're most likely taught

by non-English speaking instructors. For English lessons, the lessons

will be done in private lessons and they cost \20,000 for a full day"

 

Are they trying to get me to stump up a lot of money for a private (which would be a group of one so all costs bourne by me!) lesson? Is the instructor likely to have little English and be frustrated if a non-Japanese speaker joins the public lessons group? I told them the day I am going to want lessons so I'd expect they would know which instructor was going to take the public group lesson so could give me a definitive answer.

 

I found a different lessons provider which is a more reasonable 11,000 per day but still not as cheap as the 4,000 that my friend paid!

 

It's a bit frustrating but I should have checked with nozawa skischool before booking the trip.

 

I think the nozawa-ski-school.html page should be changed to say they will only guarantee an English lesson if a private lesson is booked.

 

Donnie

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  • SnowJapan Admin
 Quote:
I think the nozawa-ski-school.html page should be changed to say they will only guarantee an English lesson if a private lesson is booked.


If you find what you think are mistakes in any information on our site, please send us your comments suggestions directly. This is a public forum and posting here does not guarantee that we (the people who run the forums/site) see your message. Contacting us directly does. If we don't see your message, we won't be on the case. Thank you.
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  • SnowJapan Admin

I have just spoken the people at Nozawa Ski School and the resort.

 

The guaranteed lessons in English that they offer for the day are:

 

20,000 yen for a private lesson (1-3 people)

26,000 yen for a group lesson (4 or more people)

18,000 yen for a family lesson

 

Half day is:

 

15,000 yen for a private lesson (1-3 people)

17,000 yen for a group lesson (4 or more people)

13,000 yen for a family lesson

 

The normal lessons that they offer are 4000 yen for the day (3000 yen for half a day), but you might drop on lucky and get an instructor who can talk some English and be willing to do so.

 

They said that they recommend getting in touch in advance and reserving due to the limited number of English-speaking instructors.

 

We have updated the information on SnowJapan (the linked to page in the original post) to make this clearer.

 

Thanks.

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That's right. And it also means in the above case limited to 3 people. So it can be just one person, 2 or 3 people who are together. If 3 friends take one of these lessons, then it works out as just under 7000 yen per friend.

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We just had our kids in about 11 days worth of lessons in Nozawa. We paid for regular ski school and in quiet periods they'd end up with a private lesson anyway (often 1 on 1, sometimes 2 kids with 1 instructor). They recommend private lessons for language purposes and we saw lots of people doing it, but it seemed unnecessary for the most part. In particular kids learn by watching and doing more than listening so it's maybe less of a problem for them.

 

The thing I didn't like about the Nozawa ski school is it was hard to negotiate a discount for longer term bookings (1 day rate the same as 1 week). And also the children had to do the same boring test every day that often involved a 10m ski down an almost flat slope followed by a snowplow stop. Our eldest would ski alone on the steep bumps adjacent to the ski school before class then have to do this irrelevant test every single day?! The main problem was continuity of instructors. I don't know what they do with them but they seem to recycle instructors so every week there was a fresh batch in the children's ski school right up to the supervisor. As a result (and in conjunction with the weak test) they couldn't properly assess our kids so they'd end up wasting half the morning before the instructor sorted out the group's ability level. We often had the eldest skiing Uenotaira when he (and the youngest) could easily ski Yamabiko or Challenge. I've never seen a ski school run like this before (and I've instructed in Europe and Canada and know a bit about how other countries run ski schools). It could do with a bit of an organisational revamp. At least a more involved test and some achievement/grading system so the next days' instructors could see what level students they were dealing with. </rant over>

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I don't mean to be cheeky, but why didn't you just save the cash and teach your kids yourself? If your son can already ski down the various slopes (I've never been to NO so don't know the difficulty of said slopes) i would've thought that you'd save the cash and give them poitners as you go

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Not cheeky. It would've saved a lot of cash, but I prefer to ski at a slightly different level than my son. As it was the kids were in ski school for 11 days out of ~25, so we did ski with them a lot. I taught skiing for many years so I'm a bit over it now. Next time I'll probably take the eldest out of ski school. We like ski school to give us some free time to ski, but also obviously teach them good skills.

 

For reference, Uenotaira is flat, so flat that you barely pick up speed while going straight the whole way (if you go straight the whole way you still have to skate to get back to the lift). Challenge is the steepest inbounds area on the mountain. Yamabiko is right up the top and has good introductory offpiste. So for a kid who can ski the steepest runs and moderate offpiste, putting them on a flat run is kind of a waste of everyone's time and money. It was just disappointing when we'd pick them up after ski school and they'd say they spent the session on Uenotaira when you'd expect them to be taken on the steeps or in ungroomed stuff.

 

SJ#1, they just need to deal with information a bit better. E.g. I had a 3 year old daughter in ski school. She can ski well for her age (red runs no problem, easy blacks OK). But officially under 5s are supposed to only do 1/2 days and usually only mess around on the flats down at the bottom. I got the message across early in the holiday that she didn't fit into the existing classifications and that was OK. But each morning or every few mornings a different person would be organising things and she'd get shunted off to the baby groups. So then I'd have to explain the whole situation again, to the instructors outside and to the office staff inside. This happened on at least 4 different occasions. There was a guy in the office who was aware of the situation (Japanese-Australian guy with long hair working the desk), but with new instructors outside every day we had to go through the same process again and again. I don't know a solution, other than continuity of instructors (or at least supervisors) and maybe offering multi-day course options (same applies to discounts for long term visitors). And they need a more challenging classification test.

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  • 2 weeks later...
 Originally Posted By: SJ#1
The normal lessons that they offer are 4000 yen for the day (3000 yen for half a day), but you might drop on lucky and get an instructor who can talk some English and be willing to do so.


This is what I did. I got very lucky and my instructor (Itaru?) spoke excellent English and got me a flying start.

My lesson was on Fri so it was pretty quiet and there were only 3 of us in the group. The other 2 were a Hawaiian/Japanese mother and her 10 year old daughter so the lesson was pretty much entirely in English. Also, they only did a half-day so the afternoon turned into a private lesson and we went up the gondola and by the end of the day I was carving down the beginner runs \:\) Great stuff.

The snow conditions were excellent (though the weather wasn't so great) and I'd recommend Nozawa for beginners. It's also a nice village and the onsen are pretty cool/hot!

Thanks for updating the lessons page for Nozawa SJ1.
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