Belarusian State University
ONOZAKI Ryo

In June 2016, Belarusian State University (hereinafter “BSU”) ran the “Fourth GUAM Japanese Speech Contest.” In the last few years, the “Belarusian Japanese Speech Contest” has also been held at BSU. In March 2017, a long-desired resource center was set up, and in July the JLPT was held in Belarus. We expect BSU to exist at the heart of Japanese-language education in this area in the future.

Right now, there are nine third-year students and twelve first-year students studying Japanese as their specialty at BSU.

In 2016, the new first years enrolled on the Japanese course. They were all girls, and one of them was an international student from Turkmenistan. At first, when classes began, there was a conflict between two opinions: “I want to study intensively” and “I want to study without rushing,” so we didn't start with a very good atmosphere. However, now students from both sides are doing their best: “We want to quickly become good at Japanese.”

The third years have already finished elementary level and entered intermediate level. The local Japanese-language teachers are responsible for classes that focus on reading comprehension, and the Japanese-Language Specialists are in charge of classes that focus on conversation. The textbook used is “Marugoto: Japanese Language and Culture Intermediate.” Somewhere along the line, kanji, which the students hated, has become indispensable. They despaired that they wouldn’t understand the teachers’ Japanese because they speak fast, but before they knew it, they could speak with fluency. They seem very reliable as they boldly speak in Japanese.

A beautiful sunrise. This is the view from the classroom window in first period during the winter.

It has been around three years since I was dispatched to Belarus. BSU’s students have high levels of Japanese proficiency, but there was an obvious tendency to shy away from speaking. My predecessor also passed down this opinion to me. However, both the third and first years have realized that words are the tools of communication, and are enjoying practicing speaking. Additionally, more students are taking on different challenges with the dream of studying in Japan. Unfortunately, there are very few chances for them to study in Japan, or to use their Japanese in Belarus. Nevertheless, we sometimes get requests to interpret for people connected to martial arts who are visiting from Japan, and when this happens our students really fight to do their best, unafraid even though they know absolutely nothing about martial arts. In the future, I hope that the relationship between Belarus and Japan becomes more active, so the hopes of all the people concentrating on their studies with big dreams can come true—for example, wishing to study in Japan, or to get a job that lets them use Japanese.

Using tablets rather than copying the textbook is common sense.