Four CLAIR staff members took part in a Japanese language class at UNSW (the University of New South Wales) on 24 September.
Native Japanese speaking visitors as well as people from UNSW joined an advanced Japanese language class on campus. Students researching particular parts of the Japanese language (e.g. omitting subjects, postpositional particles, onomatopoeia, ‘four-character’ idioms, youth slang) asked the visiting native speakers about these topics, directly in Japanese.
For native Japanese people, because Japanese is acquired naturally, some questions were hard to answer. However, we rediscovered the delicate differences between English and Japanese, and had a chance to discover the subtle charm and profoundness of our native tongue, as seen through the students’ many interesting questions.
