Japanese in Context: A Nihongo no Niwa Student Competition

Before we even set foot in Japan this year, we had already planned something a little different for our students. We wanted to create a way for students to engage with Japanese as it actually appears in daily life, not through textbook-tailored sentences or curated JLPT examples, but through Japanese as it is lived and encountered in Japan itself.

Station signs. Menus. Warning notices. Handwritten posters. All those wonderfully chaotic fragments of everyday language you’re expected to understand on the move. This is the kind of Japanese you have to make sense of quickly, relying on context and instinct as you go about your day. For non-native speakers, that can be intimidating - but we knew our students were up for the challenge!

That’s how our Japanese in Context Student Competition was born.

While we were in Japan, every second day starting from the Sunday we arrived, we shared a photograph of Japanese language we encountered out in the wild. Train platforms; Shops; Streets; Cafés... The kind of text you glance at for a few seconds and somehow need to understand in the fast-paced cities of Japan.

The challenge for students was simple, in theory: translate what you saw. Dictionaries and kanji dictionaries were allowed - because that is largely how real learning takes place - but everything else relied on your own eyes, instincts, and growing familiarity with the language - strictly without using any image-grabbing or translation software (those banes of true learning!). The goal was to see how well students would cope with the language, and kanji, in context.

To keep things fair, we split the competition into two divisions: students with more than three years of Japanese study, and students with fewer than three. At the end of the trip, the student with the highest score in each category, or the strongest translation in the event of a tie, would win a small prize straight from Japan. And wow… we are so proud of everyone who took part.

What followed over the weeks were many submissions of considered translations, clever interpretations, and the (more-than-occasional) beautifully justified contextual guess. Some entries caught tiny nuances. Others went over and above the call of duty, translating entire menus instead of the highlighted text.

Then, before we knew it…

終わりました！

The competition officially came to a close, and it turned out to be an incredibly close race. In the upper division, there was only half a point separating first and second place. In the lower division, the top three competitors were divided by just four points.

Our winners are マックスさん, who scored an impressive 89.5 points out of a possible 99 in the upper bracket, and フランスさん, who took the win in the lower bracket with 83 points. Both managed to sneak ahead during the final week, which we like to think of as the academic equivalent of a last-minute sprint to the finish line. These Cape Town–based winners received their prize packs at our year-end event with much support from the other students.

A huge おめでとうございます to both winners, and a heartfelt よくできました to everyone who participated. We were genuinely impressed by the level of care, curiosity, and confidence shown across the board. We're so please that all our students enjoyed the competition as much as they did, and it was great to have them all alongside us, in a small way, as we journeyed across Japan. Learning Japanese goes well beyond just learning the rules, and we can't wait to do this again.