Kaori Tanaka has taught Japanese as a second language to learners from various linguistic and cultural backgrounds in Taiwan, Japan, Poland and Canada. She used to work as a Japanese language education consultant in Canada and conducted numerous teaching seminars.

She studied general linguistics and Japanese language education at Reitaku University focused on contrastive study between Mandarin Chinese and Japanese. Except for contrastive linguistics, her interests include cross-cultural communication and teaching pedagogy.