{"id":43439,"date":"2026-08-21T12:00:16","date_gmt":"2026-08-21T03:00:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.waseda.jp\/inst\/icc\/?p=43439"},"modified":"2026-08-21T12:11:49","modified_gmt":"2026-08-21T03:11:49","slug":"lce-pax-report-3-2-2-4","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.waseda.jp\/inst\/icc\/news-en\/2026\/08\/21\/43439\/","title":{"rendered":"Connecting Through Language &#8211; ICC Language &#038; Culture Exchange (Spring 2026) Participant Report"},"content":{"rendered":"<h6 style=\"text-align: right;\">\u00a0<span class=\"fontstyle0\">Wil<br \/>\nCJL (Center of Japanese Language)<\/span><\/h6>\n<p><span class=\"fontstyle0\">Living abroad can be challenging for many people, including me, especially because of the language barrier. When I first came to Japan, I already had a basic foundation in Japanese, but I soon realized that my speaking ability was still quite limited. That was why I decided to practice Japanese with native speakers to improve my Japanese speaking skills.<br \/>\n<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span class=\"fontstyle0\">I first learned about the ICC Language Exchange Program through Waseda University&#8217;s social media and emails. As soon as I received the registration email, I signed up immediately. Since I can speak both Indonesian and English, I hoped to find a partner who wanted to exchange Japanese for one of those languages. After the matching process, I was paired with a Japanese student who wanted to improve his English.<br \/>\n<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span class=\"fontstyle0\">My partner is a student in the School of Human Sciences. For several weeks, we met online because he was busy with his club activities and part-time job, while I also had a lot of homework from CJL. At first, I was worried about whether I would be able to communicate with him, since I had very little experience speaking with native Japanese speakers. However, during our first online meeting, our conversation flowed naturally, and I gradually became more confident. We talked about our daily lives, university life, hobbies, languages, and many other topics.<br \/>\n<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span class=\"fontstyle0\">After that, we continued meeting online regularly. After the semester ended, since we had more available time, we finally decided to meet in person. We talked about many things, and I learned that he is currently preparing for an English proficiency test because he believes it will help with his future job hunting. It was truly a wonderful and valuable experience, and I am very grateful because, besides improving my Japanese speaking skills, I was also able to make a new friend through ICC.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>\u00a0Wil CJL (Center of Japanese Language) Living abroad can be challenging for many people, including me, especia [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":40946,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[95,97],"tags":[116],"class_list":["post-43439","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news-en","category-other-en","tag-event-report-en"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.waseda.jp\/inst\/icc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43439","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.waseda.jp\/inst\/icc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.waseda.jp\/inst\/icc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.waseda.jp\/inst\/icc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.waseda.jp\/inst\/icc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=43439"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.waseda.jp\/inst\/icc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43439\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":43618,"href":"https:\/\/www.waseda.jp\/inst\/icc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43439\/revisions\/43618"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.waseda.jp\/inst\/icc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/40946"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.waseda.jp\/inst\/icc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43439"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.waseda.jp\/inst\/icc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=43439"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.waseda.jp\/inst\/icc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=43439"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}