We are delighted to announce the winners of the 2018 JSANZ Tertiary Japanese Language Speech Contest.

• First place: Jee Hyun Cho (University of Auckland)
• Second place: Gabrielle Gibb-Faumuina (University of Canterbury)
• Third equal place: Vincent Nicoll-van Leeuwen (Ara Institute of Canterbury) / Vanessa Tubman (Massey University)

We would like to congratulate all of the participants. The judges were impressed with the quality of their speeches and had great difficulty selecting the winners. Well done! All of the participants will receive a certificate and summarised comments from the judges.

This year’s national champion Jee Hyun Cho will receive return air tickets to Japan. A huge thank you to Japanese Chamber of Commerce of Auckland INC ‘Nisui-Kai’ for supporting our event as the major sponsor. Jee’s winning speech video clip will be released soon through JSANZ Facebook and JSANZ website.

Gabrielle Gibb-Faumuina, Vincent Nicoll-van Leeuwen and Vanessa Tubman will receive Prezzy cards, sponsored by the Sasakawa Fellowship Fund for Japanese Language Education, New Zealand Association of Japanese Language Teachers and the Japan Foundation, who will also contribute to the cost of travel for students to the prize giving.

We hope the participants continue their Japanese learning journeys and wish them all the best for their future.

The winning speech video of the JSANZ Tertiary Japanese Language Speech Contest has been added to the JSANZ YouTube Channel along with the other winners since 2014. Watch and enjoy them! A big thank you to Jee Hyun Cho, the 2018 winner, for adding English subtitles so that people with no or little knowledge of Japanese can also understand.

General comment from a judge

 It was wonderful to see how well all candidates demonstrated their topics, Japanese expressions and presentations to such a high standard, representing their tertiary institutions admirably. I even wondered how many Japanese native speakers could do this as well as our contestants did. Personally, the originalities of content about ‘dual citizenship’ and ‘love for their own cultures’ impressed me a lot. I would like to mention three things for your future presentations below.

Originality:  Everyone’s speech topics are based on personal experiences, which are certainly ‘original’. But, those who related their personal experiences to social issues perhaps scored more highly in the content category as it arguably brings the audience in a deep way. 

Presentations: A good principle for future speeches of this kind is that it is definitely preferable for contestants to have memorised their speeches. If you can perform it without any cue card, it gives a very good impression to the judges. Also, it is very important where you look at during a speech. If you look around and talk to everyone instead of focusing on the front audience, it could definitely improve your delivery to the audience.   

Accent and intonation: Several contestants had great topics, accurate grammar and a wonderful presentation, but their pronunciation let them down a bit. I highly recommend that everyone to practice accent and intonation over and over when preparing their presentation, even having a native speaker drill you on this.

I hope that those suggestions might help your future learning of Japanese. 

The Japan New Zealand Business Council Conference took place in Auckland from the 19 November.

JSANZ members were unable to attend this year but Dallas Nesbitt (JSANZ co-Vice-President) and Junji Kawai (JSANZ Treasurer) took advantage of the opportunity to network with one of our supporters from the JNZBC, Mr Tada (2nd from left in the photo) and the Managing Director of JTB New Zealand, Mr Nonaka (first on the left in the photo). 

This year, two third-year Japanese students (2016), Bella Reid (Victoria University of Wellington) and Hayley Bartosh (Massey University), were awarded the Ambasador’s Prize for Japanese in a joint ceremony and luncheon at the Ambassador’s residence on 1 June. AVC International Stuart Morris, Penny Shino and Toshi Yamaguchi (Massey), and Head of School of Languages and Cultures Associate-Professor Sally Hi and Emerald King (VUW) also attended. The VUW prize was established by the Japanese Ambassador to New Zealand in 1980, His Excellency Mr Takahashi Oyamada, to mark the introduction of the course on Modern Japan. The Massey prize was established in 2013.