IGS 3^rd-year student, Kris Hadian participated in "The 62^nd International Speech Contest in Japanese" held at Saga-city on May 29, and gave a speech on "Hiroshima and Osaka Dialects". He decided to participate in the speech contest because he wanted to spread the fascination of Hiroshima and Osaka dialects to many foreigners. In his speech, he talked about some interesting experiences of living in Japan and the meaning of dialects to him.

This is a comment from Kris Hadian, who received the award.

"When I applied, I was not expecting to get an award at all. After I joined IGS, I do not use Japanese so often, so I did not have that much confidence in speaking Japanese. Also, because this speech contest is one of the biggest speech contests in Japan, not only students but all foreigners from all over Japan can participate. I thought I would fail in the preliminary screening. However, I realized that all the participants have different stories, thus I did not have to compare myself with the others, therefore I was able to speak in my own way.”

The video of Kris Hadian's speech is available here.