Hello everyone! I am Letizia Bianchi from group 2, 働き方, and today I would like to draw conclusions about my experience during Virtual Study Abroad Exchange.

Thanks to this internship I have improved my Japanese in a different way from lessons. In fact, during the weekly meetings, we had the great opportunity to talk with other group’s members and Japanese students. At the beginning I was so scared to do mistakes and my oral comprehension was not so good, but I noticed improvements every week. I stopped worrying about making mistakes and I started to get really involved. The fact that we had themes to discuss about, helped me so much. I tried to prepare some materials every week so that I had some points to treat. I studied a lot of specific words and even grammar structures, but the purpose was not getting a good mark, indeed having the possibility to communicate my ideas during the conversation.

In addition, I have also improved my writing. Thanks to the blog we had the opportunity to write posts about the theme of the week. It gave me the chance to reflect further on all the ideas that emerged during the discussion with my teammates and to draw conclusions. I loved reading other group’s posts too, a lot of them had such interesting topics.

However, what this project has left me, beyond the didactic improvement, is personal growth. I have learned, thanks to my mates, that team working is a great opportunity if each member of the team brings a piece of themselves with the aim of obtaining a greater result than what they would achieve alone.

Moreover, thanks to the relaxed atmosphere during the conversations I was able to overcome the initial shyness and make the most of this opportunity.

Finally, I love researching, so that I liked very much getting information about our weekly topics and then using them to express my ideas. I really, really love discussions, for this reason I appreciate this project, because the aim was sharing ideas and different point of views and the language was only the tool.

In conclusion, my feedback to this project is positive and I will recommend this project to my friends.

Thank you for reading,

Letizia