Hello everybody, I’m Virginia BURDESE from group 3(環境問題).
Here are some of my impressions over this interesting project which is unfortunately ending.

I decided to take part to this university activity because I wanted to improve my Japanese skills, especially the conversation ones, and of course to get to know more people from my university and from Japan as well. However, it turned out to be more than this: what I learned will be surely important not only for my university career, but also for my relationships and for my future job, I believe.

During this project I took part to my Slack group’s chat, sending articles, videos, and materials I found, and I kept up with the conversation around our topic, which was environmental issues. Being that quite a broad topic, it was sometimes difficult to understand each other while examining complex ideas, but with everyone’s help we always managed to do our tasks quite well. What’s more, each week I tried to talk as much as possible during the conversation classes too, and I have to say that my confidence in speaking Japanese has grown over time.

In fact, thanks to this project, not only I’ve made new friends and had the chance to interact with Japanese students as well, but I’ve also enriched my vocabulary on many different topics and improved my ability to express myself in Japanese. I also acquired transversal skills such as time management, document and screen sharing, organization of tasks and cooperation with my colleagues.

I believe that all the skills that I’ve acquired during these two months, both telematic and linguistic, will be useful in the future, both for my studies and for my future job. In fact, I guess I will be able to better manage tasks and time, as well as participate more actively in group activities.
Furthermore, observing the work of my group leaders and junior coordinators, I got to know how a group leader work has to be carried out, and as a consequence I think I can help my classmates too during our conversation lessons, for example using tools such as screen-share or computer’s audio-share.

Since there were also students of years after mine in the conversation groups, I sometimes found it slightly difficult to develop complex topics, but both students and teachers have always been there to explain or repeat concepts, so it was fine, and productive too.
For being the first year of this activity, I think it was well thought out. Sometimes it was difficult to understand the tasks, especially at the beginning, but both junior coordinators and teachers have always been very willing to answer doubts and questions.

To sum up, I am very satisfied with this project and I would like to take part to it again next year. I found it very stimulating and useful and I noticed my progress both in Japanese language and in group work’s skills, so I recommend this experience to anyone who would like to improve their language or skills, or simply practice conversation in Japanese.

So, thank you very much to all those who organized and took part in the project! I’m very glad I seized this opportunity.
A special thank goes to my teammates and our group’s coordinators: you’ve been so patient and fundamental in order to work things out, I’ve been lucky to have the chance to work with all of you, and I hope we all will be able to keep in contact even after this project has ended. 😊

お疲れさまでした。

Virginia