Hello everyone! I’m Sara from group 9 “就職について”. Now that we’re at the end, I’d like to share my thoughts on this project.

Given my low level of Japanese and the presence of people with more experience than me, I was initially very unsure about my participation in this project. However, I got along very well with the members of my group right from the start and managed to fit in well.

I had the opportunity to talk about various topics with Japanese people, share my ideas and impressions on certain topics and also get to know the opinions of others. This certainly proved to be very useful in deepening my knowledge of the various topics covered and gave me the opportunity to communicate in Japanese and improve my communication skills. I really liked the 自由会話, in which I was able to communicate directly with other people outside my group and with greater freedom regarding the topics covered.

As for the theme of my group (work), I must admit that I was not totally satisfied, but I still found it better than other themes proposed. The members of my group were all fantastic people and certainly collaborative, which helped a lot in addressing the various aspects of the topic.

I also enjoyed the blog. It gave the opportunity to get to know and deepen the topics addressed by the other groups and I found many of them really interesting. In addition, writing and reading the posts allowed me to improve my Japanese writing skills and learn many new words.

However, I must admit that there were also many things that I found problematic and unsatisfactory.

I found it very difficult to talk about the same topic for 2 months. The sub-themes definitely helped to discuss different aspects of the macro-theme, but it was nevertheless a limitation and it often happened that a topic was addressed several times by the other groups as well. Fortunately, during the 自由会話, I had the opportunity to deal with a different topic from the one assigned to me in the project and in this way I had the opportunity to talk about other topics as well. In my opinion, the ideal would have been to deal with a different theme every week, so as to create more dynamism and give the opportunity to focus on the aspects of greatest interest.

Another problem was the Slack chat. Since the weekly topic was discussed in the weekly zoom meeting, despite the group efforts there was no possibility to open further discussions in the chat and therefore I found it decidedly impractical and discontinuous.

To sum up, I think that this project, despite the problems encountered, was certainly a very interesting and useful experience. It allowed me to improve my Japanese and explore various very current issues in a broader perspective.