Hello, my name is Giulia and I have worked for one month with the 8 group, whose theme was tourism.

At the beginning of this course, I was a little bit terrified and anxious. There were a lot of new people that I did not know, and I always thought that I was not particularly good at speaking this language. When I saw that I was going to speak to my elders, I was even more terrified. Slowly I understood what we should have done and that this was not just my problem but many of my fellow’s teamwork felt the same.  At the same time, I thought that it was difficult to speak with the computer rather than face to face. But as time passed, I finally understood how Zoom worked and I am incredibly pleased that now I can use it well.  I did not also quite understand how to use NolBrick, and Slack. There were a lot of groups and there was a lot of information that was given but I did not quite catch that fortunately, my teamwork helped me understand how it was supposed to be used. It took me a couple of weeks to finally get the hang of it, but I finally made it.

 I am grateful to this project because I was able to practice my Japanese and my confidence with this language has gotten better. I was able to make new friends, discover new things and understand different point of views from everybody. It was also nice to distract myself and have something to do while there is this pandemic situation. I was able to speak with my elders in Japanese and even if there were some mistakes, they would correct me and let me know what the correct form or word was the correct one, they were supportive and compassionate people.

I also noticed that when we speak with other students we tend to talk more and care less about our mistakes, while with the teachers we try our best to formulate a phrase but talk less. I think that this kind of work should be also used by the teachers to help us improve our Japanese. After this experience I would like to write in Japanese and Italian my own blog about tourism and use the skills that I have acquired by this project. I hope that my lessons were good and that somebody learnt something new. I would recommend this project again so that many other people are able to participate and to improve themselves as I did.