Hello everyone, I’m Lucilla Giannetta from Group 6 教育制度, and with this post I would like to expose you my point of view about this project! I hope you enjoy it. ^.^

So, In my opinion, this experience was really useful. First, for those who can not benefit (economically speaking) from traveling to the country in which the language is being studied, in our case Japan. Also, meet new people.

About this last point, I’m a shy person who makes much effort to speak and take the initiative with someone whom I do not know. So, thanks to this project, people like me, found themselves having to go out of their comfort-zone; a thing, which I think, is really important when we have to deal with others. 

As for the group work, personally I found nice people to interact with, and it was very pleasant to work with them. Of course, it was difficult to bring out different topics for 7 weeks, but thanks to the collaboration of everyone (like discussing, and choosing all together) we can achieve a beautiful discussion.

But not only in the group activities, also, very interesting, were the free conversation lessons; both as  participant as facilitator, I saw firsthand the difficulties of both language differences and language level. Being a facilitator of the project in a second year lesson, made me aware that: the issue of “being at a lower level”, sometimes, makes communication difficult. I’ve seen not only with my second year kouhai, I personally get the fear of speaking with my senpai; but once you overcome this “fear”, talking with other fellow students, in a relaxed and friendly environment, makes these lessons a precious opportunity to learn new things and meet new people!

As for the language. As well as learning new terms (thanks to personal and group research), I think it is especially important the fluency in speaking, so: use the right words, knowing how to apply the right grammar form, and this process needs to be done in little time, which, in my opinion, as well as having a great vocabulary, is an essential factor in the communication with other people, and in making it fluid and smooth.
When I started this project, I was unconfident about my skills: my little vocabulary, and stiffness while speaking. Now, for sure, I’m not as fluent as I want to be, but thanks to this experience, I got to train myself, and make me closer to my goals. 

In conclusion, I would like to thanks all of you, to have travelled this journey together. I hope that one day thi precious skills and memories that we have acquired may be useful.
Thank you so much for reading this post to the end.