Learning Japanese

Our meeting on the 10^th of February was held in a room with a television. The topic this time was "Learning Japanese". This is the second year since we have started teaching Japanese in our meetings. By Japanese we do not mean only the language, but also the culture and its influence on young people. Michi and Camille were in charge of the meeting.

When the meeting started, we emphasized the influences of Japanese pop culture on young people in Hong Kong. Japanese products such as stationeries, cartoons, comics, pop songs and idols are all around us. It is important for us to learn more about other countries so as to widen our horizon.

The 50 Japanese alphabets and some short sentences like ‘hello’, ‘good bye’, and ‘good morning’ were taught. The guides also learnt some useful words like ‘flowers’, ‘mother’, ‘father’, ‘eyes’ and ‘nose’.

Then we had a movie display. It was a Japanese movie with subtitles. The aim of this activity was to learn some conversation patterns and discourse strategies of Japanese. We hope that it was more interesting and useful than only reading alphabets.

The meeting had been useful to all our members. Through this activity, our members had the chance to learn a second foreign language.