Hello everyone! I am Silvia from group 9 就職 and I would like to share with you all what it meant to me the project “Virtual Exchange”.

I attend the third year of university and I am going to graduate this summer, in July. These three year of studies had been hard and at beginning I was so worried about my university’s choice. First days of classes I was full of doubt, I could not believe in myself and in my skill of learning a new language, an extremely difficult language such as Japanese. I remember that after my first lesson of Japanese I started crying because everything seemed to me so impossible to face.
I did not know how to learn kanji, I did not know how to read or how to write, everything was so confusing. Day by day, I kept believing that one day I would become able to speak japanese fluently thank to university’s lessons and to my future stay in Japan.
Now I am attending my third year of university, but due to COVID-19 I could not go to Japan as well as a large part of my collegues.
When I was at my first year of university I was looking forward to this moment to come, but now all the chances to be an exchange student in Japan are gone.

Now, even though COVID-19 are changing our lives, I had the opportunity to become a member of this project, trying to get the best out of this project. Thanks to this project I had the opportunity to talk to japanese people and to get my japanese better.
During the first week of this new experience I was worried, because speaking in front of other people is always hard to me. I tried to repet to myself that I had to take this chance, without thinking about the mistakes I could have made speaking a different language from mine.
I felt I had a lot of things to say and a lot of things to learn just by listening to other people. I think this is the most important target to achieve during this experience, growing up together just by talking about the differences of our cultures.

I think that the question that I asked the most could be “why”: “why does japanese people work so much?”, “Why is so important wearing that kind of suits?”, “why is hard to leave the office before other people do so?”. Asking why is important, is important to deeply understand and feel other’s people’s belief and culture. It is important in order to understand their values and to understand what they believe. Every time I got the answer to this question I realized it was different from that I would expected, but I never thought that the answer given was strange. I think that from culture to culture everything is different, but nothing is “strange”. Now I feel myself stronger and capable to go beyond the “barrier of language” feeling closer to other people from other culture. This is my goal and thank to this project I had the chance to achieved it.