2021 Activity Report

March Activity Report

29 March 2022
Global Japan Office Coordinator
IWASAWA YUKIKO

As the saying goes, "�������� (Sankan-Shion, three cold days and four warm days)��, extremely cold days and warm days came repeatedly this month, telling us the slow start of spring. The cherry blossoms on campus have begun to bloom, and on warmer days, I enjoy the scent of earth and grass. In Taiwan, it seems that once the Dragon Boat Festival arrives, it finally turns into full-blown summer, and I wonder when I should change my clothes. Today, I am working with a thick coat that I thought I would never wear again.

Now this is the hardest time for undergraduates majoring in Japanese for graduation work and thesis work, and several students came to my GJO office to check their Japanese.

Ms. Q likes cats, so she decided to write three Japanese essays about cats for her graduation project. She was not sure how to translate the Japanese word "���䣨Kisotsu��" in the essays into Chinese. In Taiwan, students don��t look for job as they do in Japan. After graduation, without a specific time frame, they look for jobs, so there is not a distinction between the terms "new graduates" and "former graduates". In the end, I could not find a word that fits exactly, but I thought that sticking to the meaning of one word and thinking about it is itself the most exciting part of learning.

Ms. W came to our office. Her favorite Japanese Vtuber was going to have a reading event on Rohan Koda's "Nomichi" and she wanted to know about the contents of the work. The novel "Nomichi" is a simple story in which the main character enjoys wildflowers while taking a walk with his intellectual seniors. The Japanese expressions used in modern literature are too difficult for me and are not used much in daily life today, so I had to translate them into simple Japanese by dictionaries and sometimes explaining them in Chinese. It was a good learning opportunity for me as well.

A Hong Kong student, Ms. H, also came to visit our office. She has been studying Japanese for only two years, but her pronunciation was beautiful and she was able to communicate well. She likes Japanese idol groups and anime, and has been watching Japanese TV programs for a long time, so she doesn��t have a problem in listening comprehension. However, he had not studied grammar, so surprisingly, he failed the N3 exam.

In my case, when I started studying Chinese, I was good at writing Chinese because I focused on only grammar and reading. When I first met a Taiwanese person with whom I had been exchanging e-mails in Chinese, she was surprised at my poor speaking ability. I realized that language ability cannot be measured by one ability alone, and I introduced the TUFS Language Module to Ms. H.

Cherry blossoms at TamKang University

February Activity Report

28 February 2022
Global Japan Office Coordinator
IWASAWA YUKIKO

During the first half of this month, we were unable to enter the office during the winter break, so I interacted with students online. The students, who come to our office almost every time, told me about how they spend the Chinese New Year in Taiwan. They said that Chinese New Year in Taiwan is just like in Japan, where family and relatives get together to eat, play dice games and a board game called "Xiangqi" (Chinese chess), and have a good time. In Taiwan, there is a New Year's gift called a "hongbao (red envelope) ". As in Japan, the New Year's gift is given from adults to children, but after the children reach adulthood, they give the "red envelopes" to their parents.

One of the students had studied Japanese in high school by joining the karuta club. Since there are not many opportunities to play karuta in Taiwan, she has only remembered one phrase now. I promised her that we would definitely have a karuta tournament at GJO next time.

They also had a happy report: Ms. W was successfully accepted to an on-campus scholarship, so she is having a fulfilling winter break by taking a paid business Japanese course and participating in an online exchange program with a Japanese university. Ms. C, who was studying for the Japanese Language Proficiency Test (JLPT), successfully passed the first level. It is wonderful to see Taiwanese students studying diligently and diligently and achieving proper results.

One of the students suggested that he wanted to study difficult words, so I asked them to read Japanese news. It was news about the Beijing Olympics. It looked difficult to read because of many katakana characters in people's names, but they said it was a good learning experience. In addition, we worked out past exams together in order to take the entrance exam of translation institute in a university in March. The content was of a very high level, with questions in Japanese and translation from Chinese to Japanese and Japanese to Chinese.

One student joined us online for the first time by seeing the flyer. He was a transfer student from another university and joined us from his hometown Pingtung. Tamsui, where Tamkang University is located, is as cold as winter in January and February, but he said he could stay in short sleeves in the southern area. Taiwan is about the size of Kyushu in Japan, so it is not that large, but it is very interesting that the environment varies greatly from place to place.

He was a graduate of a five-year school called "��š". I did not know that Taiwan has an educational institution similar to a "technical college" in Japan. He said that the demand for "��š" has been increasing in recent years, as it offers more specialized studies. We discussed the differences between the Taiwanese and Japanese educational systems.

I found that we could talk more online than in person. Perhaps because the silent time would be awkward, everyone spoke actively without pauses. One of the advantages of online is that I can immediately type and correct the words that the students misspoke. This was well received by the students, who said that even though they usually have opportunities to speak with Japanese people, they don't have anyone to correct their Japanese, so having someone correct them on the spot was a big help.

January Activity Report

31 January