This week, we’ve been focussing on language and communication. The Tokyo City University staff & students expressed the importance of being able to communicate with locals and colleagues in Japanese, at Japanese based companies.
Even when we can’t speak the language, we can share experiences through context and expressions (like using fingers to count numbers). This helps build bonds and relationships in spite of the language barrier. Cyber is a global industry, and we often need to reach out to people of other nationalities through things like internet forums to share ideas.
Japanese Language - Counting & Dates #
We spent the middle two days of our language classes focusing on counting. It wasn’t the most riveting content, but super important for our learning. The teacher put this in the context of counting yen, time, age, and dates (things that are pretty important for daily life!).
Buddy Sessions #
After our language sessions, we spent some time with the Tokyo City University students that have been learning English to do a language exchange session. These sessions have been great as it gives us the opportunity to exchange experiences about our countries (as most TCU students have visited Australia) and build relationships with people from a different culture.
It has been great to learn about the Japanese students views on Perth, a common theme is that they find Perth to be small and sleepy, which you can understand coming from Tokyo! It was also comforting to learn that TCU students also had difficulty with Japanese language, so the feeling was mutual.
Internship Orientation #
Wednesday afternoon we met and spoke about our internship opportunities that start next week. Dr. Homma gave us advice on how to fit in and behave in these companies, and told us that respect is pivotal and to try and use the language as much as we can.
We got all prepped in our groups, exchanged contact information, and got the run down with where to meet on the first day of our internships!
Here’s some photos of things we’ve doing around Tokyo outside of our class time the last couple of days:
