EXCELLANGUES

On November 16 and 17, the language festival “EXCELLANGUES” was held at the Halle aux Foires of Libramont, located in Luxembourg Province, in attendance of Ms. Ikoma. The aim of the event is to allow students of the fifth and sixth grade of elementary schools in Luxembourg to participate as teams to learn foreign languages and enjoy different cultures at each of the booths representing a different country, including Japan.
The Embassy of Japan in Belgium, together with the cooperation of the Belgian Association of Japanese Language Teachers, held a workshop to teach 25 teams, totaling 400 children, to say simple expressions such as “hajimemashite” (nice to meet you), “konnichiwa” (hello) and “arigato” (thank you). Also, Japanese culture was introduced through learning how to read Japanese characters and the folding of a “kabuto” (samurai helmet) from a Japanese newspaper. All of the children were very curious to learn Japanese for the first time and learned actively, resulting in the impressive sight of the children being able to repeat and exercise the Japanese words they had just learned.