Students' Voices

Before I came to ICU, I didn't have the courage to speak to Japanese people although having studied Japanese course for six months. The main reason being my fear of receiving the negative responses from Japanese people when they could not understand my broken sentences. So I went through a period of time struggling with how to talk to them.

J4 was like a refresher for me to review on the grammatical rules I learned in six-months language class before coming to ICU. J4 strengthened my language foundation and I felt more confident to speak Japanese because there were a lot of activities involving speaking, discussing or expressing opinions during the class. In J4, we used basic vocabularies and grammatical structures to speak, and it was common for everyone to make mistakes. Teachers always formed groups of two or three people for discussion, and we had to talk a lot every class, keep talking until we were not so afraid anymore. I think this was a breakthrough for me to talk without thinking much about the sentence structures. I caught myself using wrong particles so many times, and it was confusing to me at the beginning. But at the end of J4, I had to say that I have found the courage to speak in Japanese without much hesitation. And I think this is the best thing about J4.

In J5, we conducted a project in which we had to interview someone about a particular facility or infrastructure in Japan. I called up a person in a facility in Saitama and asked a few questions. I tried to write down his answers, and there were definitely words that I didn’t understand. However, in J5 I wasn’t hesitant to communicate with my imperfect Japanese. I got used to using some expressions and didn’t find the need to think “what’s that word”; it came more naturally somehow. It’s not just confidence that I gained in J5 but also the familiarity of speaking and listening in Japanese that made communication smoother. Outside the JLP class, I tried to use Japanese as much as possible in my daily life even though English is a convenient option.