This blog post continues on from Part 2, which funnily enough starts at Part 1. If you want to the full story please start from Part 1.
I challenge myself to think in Japanese as much as I possible. I go shopping and think about the things I need to buy, talking to myself about the items in Japanese. I look at food in the supermarket and think about them in Japanese. I also listen to Japanese as much as possible and use JapanesePod101. I listen to the podcasts nearly every day, repeating the words to myself as I walk.
Reading and writing Japanese has always been a lot more difficult for me to motivate myself and for that reason I started going to the JET Alumni Association Japanese classes that were running in my new home, Edinburgh. Eventually I was organising the Japanese language lessons myself. However, I found myself being particularly undisciplined. I would forget about the homework for a week and then quickly do it just before the class. Sometimes when I arrived at the lesson and the teacher was making tea I would quickly get out my homework and finish it before she came back! I realised this really wasn’t helping me to improve my Japanese reading and writing ability.
I spoke to my classmates and asked them if they wanted to meet halfway through the week so that we could go over our homework together. They agreed and we met up in a local coffee shop. I suggested that we meet and do the homework all in Japanese – the whole time. They agreed to give it a try and gradually this group grew, as more and more people heard that we were meeting and speaking only Japanese.
Soon, Japanese friends in Edinburgh came along too and we met in different places every week. Then more people asked where and when the meetings would be held. I started a Facebook group so that everybody could keep up with the meetings and share the events with other friends who might be interested. The group continued to develop, with immersion day-trips and in 2016 the group got a website and then we ran two 3-day JLPT Bootcamps in 2016 and 2017.
After a while people from around the world started contacting my Facebook group asking how they could join us. I told them that the club was in Edinburgh and unless they were coming to Edinburgh they wouldn’t be able to participate. It wasn’t until May 2017 that somebody challenged this and asked me why I wasn’t doing online meetings. I suddenly realised that there were lots of people who didn’t have the opportunity to speak Japanese, who didn’t have the opportunity to practice, so I started to organise online conversation calls and I invited Japanese friends to join me.
I started speaking to people from around the world and because there were people from different time zones I organised a morning, a lunchtime and an evening call and rotated these every week. Of course what happened next was that people wanted more! So I organised a special club for the really keen and gave them the choice of time and date for three weekly online conversation opportunities.
Our Edinburgh Friday group continues to this day and currently welcomes around thirty people every week. It’s crazy for me to think that all of this began from one TEFL lesson where the teacher decided to show us how to speak Japanese.
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