Meet Miss Haruna Masuda

By Miss Haruna Masuda, Language Assistant - Japanese

Hi everyone! I’m Haruna from Osaka, Japan. I’m the assistant teacher for Japanese this year. I have been working at Radford since Term 1 and will leave at the end of Term 3. My time here is getting shorter and shorter every day. Since I came here, I experienced a lot of things, and I learned a lot of things. I’m sure I made progress in many ways through my experiences here. In this article, I would like to share those experiences and how it has improved me.

I have lived with a different host family during each term. I was very nervous every time I moved to a new host family’s house. But at the same time, I was very excited to get to know new people and gain new experiences. I could experience living with three different families, and as expected, they all had different lifestyles. Since all of my host families lived in different areas, I got to experience the different atmosphere in each neighbourhood, such as Hawker, O’Connor and Florey.

I have also travelled to many places while I’ve been in Australia. I've been to Sydney, Ballarat, Melbourne, Narooma, Cairns and Uluru. I think I have done a lot of fun things during my trip. I like all of the places, but if I had to pick one, I think I would say Uluru was the best for me because I have never seen that type of scenery in Japan.

I have experienced a lot of things in Australia, but I think the biggest experience for me has been joining classes at Radford. I have enjoyed classes very much. They are very different to Japanese school. I've found the students at Radford to be very welcoming. Everyone is very nice and kind. In terms of language classes, I think the students are enjoying talking in Japanese, and teachers are teaching real Japanese. It might be natural for you, but I think it’s different to Japanese school because we tend to focus more on tests rather than using the language for communicating. That’s why teachers in Japan also tend to teach how to get good scores in tests. Also, because we don’t have a speaking test, we rarely practise speaking. This is the biggest difference that I've noticed between language classes in Australia and Japan.

Because I've joined Japanese classes every day, I've been able to learn more about my country while I've lived in Australia. I can notice the differences between Japan and Australia more through the classes. I've realised that my everyday life in Japan is totally different compared to my daily life here. I knew temples, shrines, anime and Japanese food were unique to Japan, but I didn’t know that my daily life in Japan was unique. I never thought Japanese snacks were good because it’s the only thing I know. I didn’t know Japanese bread was good either and I didn’t understand why foreign travellers took photos of just buildings in Osaka. I have become proud of my country and proud of being Japanese (of course, I love Australia too!). But I think I might not have realised these kinds of things if I hadn’t come to Radford, even if I had come to Australia on holiday. Thanks to these experiences, I now know how unique Japan is. And now I’m thinking about pursuing a job that can introduce the world to Japan. I think I found a lot of things that I want to do in the future and what I can do through the experiences I gained here. I hope students also learn more about Japan and get to like it more.

I came here to improve my English, to experience the life in Australia, and to learn how to teach Japanese, but I feel that I've learned much more than I expected. This experience really changed my life. I am really grateful because all the teachers, staff and my host families warmly welcomed me. I couldn’t have spent a wonderful time like this without them. This is the longest experience for me living outside of Japan, so I feel Canberra is my second hometown. I will leave very soon, but I’m sure I will be back here someday!