Hi, I’m Perla from Group 5福祉 and this is my experience.
I have to say that this project helped me a lot for certain reasons. I’m a really shy person and I’m really insecure when I have to speak languages that are not my native one so I usually avoid speaking during Japanese classes and speaking classes. For this reason, when I first saw that this project required to attend a speaking class every week for 2 months I felt overwhelmed and I initially thought “I can’t do this”. But fortunately in the end I decided not to listen to that voice in my head and I have no regrets. I have to admit that speaking classes have been really frustrating sometimes, but even extremely useful and quite enjoyable. Of course it’s really hard to talk about such complicated topics in a language that we have been studying for such a short period of time, but it really helped me to understand that I must not be afraid to speak, even if my grammar and my vocabulary are not perfect. I would say that this is the biggest help this project gave me, but not the only one. Thanks to this project I’ve had the opportunity to work with people from different parts of the world and with different language levels. I honestly found it really helpful because it allowed me to “meet” new people and, consequently, new cultures in a period in which it’s really hard (at least for me as a shy person) to meet new people. Moreover, talking with people who have different language levels helped me to understand mine.
Last but not least, I think that having to write articles for the blog has been really helpful too. I don’t have so many opportunities to write articles in Japanese in my everyday life, but in my opinion trying to write an article, especially about topics I generally wouldn’t write about, allowed me not only to use grammatical forms I generally don’t apply in my everyday conversations, but also to learn new useful words.