Hello everyone. I am Letizia from group #7, ‘Measures Against Hunger’. In sight of the nearly end of the project, I would like to share my thoughts on this experience with all of you.
I will first talk of my expectations before the project, then make some considerations on the experience, lastly I will state the things I enjoyed the most and make some suggestions for the future.

First of all, I am a second year student of the bachelor’s degree LICSAAM at Ca’ Foscari University. At the very beginning, after sending my application, I had nearly no idea of what the project would entail and I was surprised when I was selected for the position of Group Leader.
I am not as proficient in Japanese as my upperclassmen and I was quite worried wether I would be able to carry out my duty properly. Luckily I was not alone, and thanks to the help of the other Group Leader Francesca, without whom I would not have survived, I hope we managed to create a welcoming envirorment for everyone to share their opinions.

Following that trail, I would like to talk of my group and our experience .

The theme we were assigned was rather heavy and far from something we are used to discuss on a daily basis, however, I am glad I was part of this specific group. We managed to look into the matter deeply and to make a lot of connections with other topics too, not only learning a lot about World Hunger from a notionistic perspective, but also realizing the importance of being critical towards our daily life and change our habits in response to the knew knowledge we acquired. We also managed to talk more lightly and catch a breather together, be it watching the videos shared by different members or indulging in some mundane talk to break the ice.

Everyone worked really hard to find materials and explain such a complex theme in the simplest way possible. Although ,as you might have expected, our group theme wasn’t particularly popular during Conversation Classes and it saddens me even the most fun and interesting materials we found will only be appreciated by ourself and the people who have kindly read the articles written by our members. On that note, at the beginning reading and commenting different articles (let alone writing one!) took a fair amount of time, due to the vocaboulary and my limited knowledge of the langage of course. On the other hand, it was really rewarding and stimulating, not to mention with time I became able to read in my target language faster and with less effort.

Talking and reading in Japanese constantly for weeks really boosted everyone’s confidence and I could see very significant improvement both in myself and my teammates. I was particularly happy to have a chance to tackle more specific and challenging conversation topics, and to find different means to convey my opinion on such complex matters gave me great satisfaction. Discussing with people from abroad also allows us compare informations from a vast variety of sources and it really pushes us to try to think outside the box and to always keep an open mind, which is extremely important in a multicultural envirorment.

Of course, we had our difficulties too. It was hard to coordinate everyone’s work to meet the very different schedules of all the members and the time difference was unforgiving. Despite these obstacles I have come to cherish all my teammates and I hope we will keep in touch after the project ends.

Last but not least, I would like to make some suggestions based on what I observed during my experience. I think it would come in handy to let the students who dot actively partecipate in the project know what take on the topic will be taken in advance. For instance, we could let them know with a shared document or on a website, that the sub-theme decided for the week is ‘Hunger in animation’ with a few keywords . This way even the less popular groups could result appealing and the students wouldn’t feel intimidated to face a new topic. I also reckon it would be useful to integrate some documents to monitor everyone’s work more effectively, avoiding to disperse informations that could be written in a single paper.

In conclusion, this was an extremely valuable experience that was a great motivation for me in this tiring times to try and push out of my comfort zone and it enriched me both as a student and as person.

I hope the feeling is shared by my teammates and colleagues and that this project will resume next year.


Thank you for everything,

Letizia.