With my speech contest submission due tomorrow, I’ve recorded two videos of my speech and am currently deciding between the two. Here’s a copy of my speech for anyone who’s interested.
Participating in this speech contest was definitely another great experience with writing, and this time, reading out loud. The LTL competition I entered in for both Chinese and Japanese last December helped me work on my Japanese writing ability (the language used for speaking and writing in Japanese are very different–from the word choice to even conjugations used for verbs and adjectives!). While this speech contest furthered my formal Japanese writing ability, I was also able to practicing reading new vocabulary and characters I hadn’t seen before while saying them out loud as well.
Overall, I would say my main takeaway from this experience as a self-studying student learning Japanese is that this kind of real experience using the language is one of the best ways to improve when learning a language. Not only does it serve as practice for using what you already know and to learn more, but for me, it was also amazing to see how far I’ve come since a year ago.