Interaction volunteers

Interact with volunteer tutors in Japanese!

You can interact with a Japanese volunteer once a week.

Foreigners who live in Japan sometimes make comments such as: “Even living in Japan I have fewer opportunities to make friends or interact with Japanese people than I expected,” or “I rarely use Japanese outside of school because my friends are all of the same nationality as me.” One of the benefits of studying Japanese in Japan is that there are opportunities to talk about various topics with Japanese people.
To this end, the Osaka YMCA Gakuin Japanese Language School established a volunteer tutor system and has provided opportunities for foreign students to have conversations with Japanese people. Once a week, Japanese volunteers who are registered as tutors at the YMCA assist students with Japanese conversations upon request. The students can talk in Japanese about whatever they want, such as Japan, their own country, the Japanese way of thinking and cultural differences.

Tutor’s voice

 
Every time I meet a new foreign student, I consider what he/she expects from me as a tutor with his/her mixed feelings of anxiety and excitement and I sometimes directly ask him or her about that. It is an enjoyable moment when I find new thoughts and listening to the students about the distinctions between what they knew or expected before coming to Japan and what they actually saw in Japan. Also, they sometimes compare and point out the beauty of their countries and Japan and tell us things that we would have never known from the media, such as the distinctions in eating habits, which always leads to lively conversation. What I always keep in mind when talking to the students is to maintain open and honest communication with them. I do not know whether it was thanks to that, but I still keep in touch with some of the students for even more than a dozen years after their graduation. Through such tutoring activities, I think my perspective has broadened and I have gained energy by interacting with young people from countries I have never been to.