Terms of Service

Version 7 · in effect from 2026-08-19

1. Who provides this service

RT Nihongo Club is operated by Ritsuki Sanada (眞田律希), a sole proprietor (個人事業主) in Japan, trading as RT Nihongo Club ("we", "us"). These terms are a contract between you and the operator.

You can reach us at support@rtnihongoclub.com. We give notices to the email address on your account; a notice is treated as received the day it is sent. Legal notices to us should go to the same address and are treated as received when we read them, and no later than three business days after they arrive. Our postal address is disclosed without delay on request to the same email address.

2. The service

The service has three parts: self-study material you work through on your own; one-to-one lessons with a teacher, provided under a paid plan; and an AI study assistant. Availability of specific teachers, lesson times, and features is not guaranteed and may change as described in section 15.

3. Eligibility

You must be at least 13 years old to use the service; setup asks your age. If the age you give is under 13, setup stops and the account and its email address are deleted. If you are 13, 14, or 15, a parent or guardian must read these agreements with you and agree on your behalf during setup, and we record their name with the agreement. If you are under 18, a parent or guardian must also consent before you purchase a paid plan. We may close accounts that do not meet these requirements.

4. Your account

Your account is personal. Keep your login credentials to yourself; you are responsible for activity that happens through your account unless it results from our failure. Tell us promptly if you believe your account has been accessed by someone else.

You choose a name during setup. It is how we and your teacher address you, and it is not shown to other learners. It does not have to be your real name.

5. Plans, billing, and renewal

Paid plans bill monthly in advance and renew automatically until you cancel. Prices are shown before you subscribe and include consumption tax where it applies.

If we change the price of your plan, we will notify you by email at least 30 days before the new price takes effect. The new price applies from your next billing period after that notice, and you may cancel before then at no cost.

6. Refunds and cancellation

You may cancel your plan at any time from your account. Cancellation takes effect at the end of the billing period you have paid for; you keep access until then. We do not refund the remainder of a started billing period, except where these terms or the law of your country require it.

Because the service begins immediately and bills monthly, the cooling-off regimes of Japanese law that apply to certain long-term contracts do not generally apply to it. If mandatory consumer law in your country gives you a cancellation or refund right, that right prevails over this section.

If we terminate your account without cause (section 13), or close the service (Lesson Minutes Policy), we refund the unused portion of what you have paid.

7. Lesson minutes

Paid plans include lesson minutes that refresh each billing period and expire if unused. The Lesson Minutes Policy, which you accept before your first payment, governs minutes in full, including expiry, cancelled lessons, and what happens if the service closes. If these terms and the Lesson Minutes Policy conflict about minutes, the Lesson Minutes Policy prevails.

8. Acceptable use

You agree not to:

  • (a)harass, abuse, or threaten teachers or other learners, or behave in a way that makes the service unsafe for someone else;
  • (b)scrape, bulk-download, or republish the study material or dictionary data, except as the open licenses credited on the Credits page permit;
  • (c)access the service by automated means other than the interfaces we provide, or probe, disable, or work around its security or usage limits;
  • (d)resell, rent, or share access to your account, your plan, or your lesson minutes;
  • (e)use lessons or the AI assistant for anything unlawful, or submit content you have no right to submit.

We may suspend or terminate accounts for breach of this section as described in section 13.

9. Your content

What you write into the service remains yours: notes to teachers, practice answers, and messages to the AI assistant. You grant us the license needed to operate the service: to store, display, and process your content for the purposes these terms and the Privacy Policy describe.

If you contribute corrections or additions to the dictionary, you grant us a perpetual, worldwide, royalty-free license to use, adapt, and redistribute that contribution, including under the open licenses named on the Credits page. This is what lets an improvement you make reach other learners and other projects.

10. The AI study assistant

The AI assistant generates responses with a third-party model provider, as described in the Privacy Policy. Its answers can be wrong, including about grammar and usage; treat them as study material, not authority, and not as professional advice of any kind. Do not submit other people's personal information to it. We may set and change usage limits for AI features by plan.

11. Lesson recording

The Lesson Recording Notice, which you acknowledge at setup, describes if and how one-to-one lessons may be recorded, your right to object, and how long recordings are kept.

12. Intellectual property

The study material, software, and design of the service are owned by us or our licensors. Some dictionary and character data is used under open licenses, credited on the Credits page. These terms give you a personal, non-transferable right to use the service for your own learning, and no other license to our material.

13. Suspension and termination

You may close your account at any time.

We may suspend or terminate your account for a material breach of these terms, including section 8, or where the law requires it. Where practicable we will warn you and give you a chance to respond first; for serious misconduct, such as harassment of a teacher, we may act immediately.

  • (a)If we terminate for cause, access ends and the current billing period is not refunded, except where mandatory consumer law requires otherwise.
  • (b)If we terminate without cause, we will refund the unused portion of the current billing period, and remaining lesson minutes are handled under the Lesson Minutes Policy.

Sections that by their nature continue, including sections 9, 12, 14, 16, and 17, survive the end of this contract.

14. Disclaimers and limitation of liability

We do not guarantee that you will reach a particular level or pass an examination. We do not promise the service will be uninterrupted or error-free, and we may change or withdraw features as described in section 15.

To the extent the law allows, our total liability to you for claims arising from the service is limited to the amount you paid us in the twelve months before the claim arose. This limit does not apply to death or personal injury, to damage caused by our intent or gross negligence, or to any liability that cannot lawfully be limited, including under the Consumer Contract Act (消費者契約法) where it protects you. If you have paid us nothing, this section does not exclude liability the law does not allow us to exclude.

15. Changes to the service and these terms

We may improve, change, or discontinue features of the service. If a change materially reduces what your paid plan includes, we will notify you in advance and you may cancel under section 6 before it takes effect.

These terms are standardized terms (定型約款) under the Civil Code of Japan. We may make reasonable changes to them under Article 548-4 by notifying you in advance of the change and the date it takes effect. For material changes we will also ask you to accept the new version before you continue using the service; the version and date you accepted are recorded.

16. Governing law and jurisdiction

These terms are governed by the law of Japan. Disputes are subject to the exclusive jurisdiction of the Tokyo District Court in the first instance, except where mandatory consumer protection law gives you the right to bring or defend a claim in the courts of your own country of residence; that right is not affected.

17. General

If part of these terms is found invalid, the rest continues to apply. A failure to enforce a term is not a waiver of it. You may not assign this contract; we may assign it as part of a transfer of the business, and will notify you if we do. Neither party is liable for failure caused by events reasonably outside their control.

These terms, the Privacy Policy, the Lesson Recording Notice, and the Lesson Minutes Policy are the whole agreement between us. If they conflict, the more specific document prevails on its own subject matter.

Lesson Recording Notice

Version 3 · in effect from 2026-08-19

1. Where things stand

Lessons are not recorded today. This notice tells you, before it ever matters, what will apply if recording is introduced, so the rules are ones you saw at the start rather than ones that appeared around you. You will be told before your first recorded lesson, and at the start of any lesson that is being recorded.

2. What would be recorded, and why

A recorded lesson captures video, audio, and anything typed in the lesson. Two purposes, and no others:

  • (a)Safety. A recording is a record of what happened in a lesson, if there is ever a dispute between a learner and a teacher.
  • (b)Quality. We may review a lesson to help a teacher improve, or to investigate a specific complaint.

Recordings are not published, not sold, and not used in marketing.

3. What accepting this notice means

Accepting this notice means you have read it. It is not consent to be recorded in every lesson. You may object to recording for any lesson, by telling your teacher before it begins, and the lesson will be taught unrecorded. We keep a note of which lessons were not recorded, so the absence of a recording is itself on record.

4. Access and storage

Access to a recording is limited to the teacher, the learner, and staff investigating a specific complaint. Teachers may not download recordings or keep copies of their own. If recording is introduced, the storage provider will be named in the Privacy Policy's list of recipients before the first lesson is recorded.

5. Retention

Recordings are deleted after 90 days. A recording that is part of an open complaint is kept until the complaint is resolved, and no longer than one year, unless an active legal claim requires it to be preserved. The Privacy Policy's rights, including access to a recording of your own lesson, apply to recordings like anything else we hold.

6. Minors

If the learner is under 18, a parent or guardian must read and accept this notice, and holds the objection right in section 3 on the learner's behalf.