Hello everyone! This is Diletta from group 7 (飢餓対策). The first time I heard about this project was in January, when I received an email with the proposal of a substitute internship activity. At first, I was not sure if I was going to participate in this project because I’m not very good with Japanese language and I was afraid I would not understand anything. Then, I took courage and decided to join. I look at the topic of my group:「飢餓対策」(measures against hunger). My first thought was “What have I done, I can’t talk about hunger even in Italian”. At first it was not easy, I had to work hard to learn the Japanese words related to my group’s topic, figure out how to use Slack… But it all worked out for the best.

I was lucky enough to be in a group with great people, who didn’t make me feel bad about not being good with the Japanese language. All of them helped me and thanks to them I feel I have improved. They were able to tell hard notions with simple words, which really helped me when I had to explain these concepts during the 自由会話. I also enjoyed chatting with them on Slack every day, not only as colleagues but also as friends. As a group, we were also able to talk about such a serious subject in different ways. We talked about awareness campaigns, food waste, water issues, but also about films, food recipes, anime.

The 自由会話 experience has been very important to me as a person.  Explaining difficult notions in a language I know little was hard. But I understood that I really like teaching, which is probably what I would like to do in the future as a job.

One of the things I liked the most was writing and reading articles on the blog. I learned a lot about Japanese society and news.

In the end, this project required a lot of time and energy but I would do it again since it gave me so much in terms of confidence with the Japanese language and teamwork.

皆さん、本当にありがとうございました!