No sign of slowing down of the pandemic has been seen since the start of this fiscal year. AIRA has started all activities, taking proper measures to prevent COVID-19 from spreading. (No21-4)

Last year AIRA had to halt all activities till the end of June due to the declaration of the state of emergency to stop spreading COVID-19. On the contrary, AIRA started its activities for this fiscal year in April, taking proper measures because Chiba prefecture issued the pre-emergency measures for the COVID-19, which is likely to be extended to the end of May.

As one of the activities, AIRA has dispatched Japanese teachers to elementary and junior high-schools to support students from other countries who are not able to understand Japanese enough to keep up with classes in Japanese. AIRA has also opened online Japanese classes in May same as last year. As to the foreign language classes, AIRA couldn’t start them till July last year due to unavailability of public facilities, but they are opening in May one after another as scheduled.

The followings are the two classes held on May 22nd.

1. Translation workshop
The class is designed to enhance translation quality of the attendees for their translation to Newsletter Abiko, AIRA’s activities on this web page, and translation work requested by Abiko city and other organizations. Two native speakers of English with good command of Japanese teach 3 times each in turns, total 6 times this year, instead of 4 times last year.
In this class, a topic assigned in a column of Nikkei Newspaper was translated by each attendee and handed in to the instructor in advance. On the day, they read out their own translation in class about the article of “Unconscious Bias” provided by Mr. Yuko Tanaka, President of Hosei University in the column of “Topic to tomorrow” and the instructor Mr. Greg Leach taught better words or expressions and clues or knacks to make their translation more natural English.

2 German class
The German class was called “German Salon” till 2019 because of smaller number of students but the class became the formal class for the students with fundamental & intermediate skills in German in 2020. The instructor is Ms. Bilik Eva, German Hungarian, who has been in Japan since 2002. She started to learn German in first grade at elementary school. She is a good speaker of Japanese and one of the three translators of the book titled “HEIMKEHR NACH FUKUSHIMA” by Swiss writer Mr. Adolf Muschg.

On the day, the students studied a textbook in German, putting it another way no Japanese at all. The windows and doors were open for ventilation as well as social distance was kept.

(Translated by Ms. Hitomi Koyama)