CHIKA INAGAKI

Free English Room
Founder

Chika Inagaki from Japan is a positive person who loves languages, especially English, more than anyone in the world. She has a strong passion for making a big impact on language education to lessen the gaps in educational opportunities between native English speakers and those who don’t have enough opportunity to learn English.

At the age of 8, she fell in love with English when she first saw the movie “Frozen” in English. It was her first time being surrounded by the sound of it for a good amount time, which made her notice how beautiful the sound of English is. After that, she started to sing English songs from Frozen; that is how she started to dive into the world of English. Thanks to her English ability, she got various opportunities such as attending the program called Stanford e-Entrepreneurship, which has a 5% of acceptance rate; getting a scholarship from the Japanese government to study in Vancouver for a year; being able to have it as a choice to apply to universities in the US and more.

She had been dreaming to study at a high school in North America for a long time and she made it come true by winning the spot for the Japanese government scholarship open for only one person in the country. In Vancouver, where she decided to study, she had been working as a teaching assistant at an ESL class at a Canadian local high school and volunteering at a Japanese language school to teach Japanese to Canadian children. She started to work for a company called “EduBeyond” as a head English Curriculum Developer and also founded FER - Free English Room - , which is a weekly program where Japanese and Canadian teens interact with each other in English online.

Her other passion is singing as she played one of the main characters in a musical “Cats-young edition” in Vancouver and would often go busking there. She is working on making a program that people can learn English by singing, combining her two greatest passions.

At an university, she desires to learn the efficient ways of learning languages as well as the way to approach the problem in terms of educational gaps around the world.