About Ohanasi Kagawa Part 1: Japan, where there is no environment where people can easily immerse themselves in English

Have you ever wondered why Japanese people don’t speak English well compared to other countries in the world?

The story I am going to tell you today is about Ohanasi Kagawa, an international exchange platform that was created to change such an environment.

“What is Ohanasi Kagawa?”

I am sure that many of you are not familiar with Ohanasi Kagawa, so let me introduce ourselves again.

Ohanasi Kagawa in a nutshell is

“an international language exchange platform!”

It is a place where Japanese people who are learning English and people from all over the world who are learning Japanese can gather in one place, speak English and Japanese alternately, and interact with each other to share their cultures, values, and ideas.

Let me tell you “why” we decided to create Ohanasi Kagawa in the first place.

Ohanasi Kagawa was born from the negative feelings of frustration, despair, and discouragement of Aki, the representative of Ohanasi Kagawa.

Ohanasi Kagawa actually started not online at first, but in September 2018 in Kagawa, the smallest prefecture in Japan, where I, Aki, am from.

I was 23 years old at the time and had quit the company I had been working for since I graduated from high school to study English in order to study psychology in the United States.

I hated studying English when I was a student and only took naps during class, but I entered an American university and continued to study English with the sole intention of starting my life over again.

It was about a year after I started studying English that I felt a great sense of despair.

I had studied grammar and vocabulary on my own and had come to understand English to a certain extent, so I decided that I wanted to actually speak English with English speakers.

I immediately went online and googled “where to speak English with English speakers”.

I never dreamed that 30 minutes later, I would feel a great “despair”.

To be continued in my next blog.

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