The Second Annual Japanese Language Contest Guidelines
- The Japanese Language Contest is comprised of two areas:
- a speech contest
- an essay contest
- The Japanese Language Contest will be held on April 21, 2012.
- The contest is open to students who are currently enrolled in a Japanese language course at a university/college within the six New England states (CT/MA/ME/NH/RI/VT) and have not:
- lived in Japan three or more years in total since 2001
- come from homes where Japanese has been spoken regularly
- won the first prize in the same category of this contest in the past
- The deadline for entries is Wednesday, March 14 at 5:00pm EST. Essays or speech texts must arrive by this time at the Consulate General of Japan in Boston.
While submission by postal mail is fine, email submissions are strongly encouraged. Send the essay or the text as an email attachment (Word or pdf preferred) to: infocul@cgjbos.org.
- Each entry must include a fully completed Entry Form, which indicates the exact character count. The Entry Form should be filled in by the author of the essay or speech, checked and signed by the author’s instructor and sent as a scan with the essay to the email address above.
Click here for the Entry Form.
- Each university/college will be allowed three entries each for both essay and speech contests.
- Students should choose the appropriate contest level:
- Speech Contest:
- Essay Contest:
Intermediate Division: students who have completed fewer than two years of Japanese language study.
Advanced Division: students who have completed two or more years of Japanese language study.
Intermediate Division: students who have completed fewer than two years of Japanese language study.
Advanced Division: students who have completed two or more years of Japanese language study.
(Two years of high school Japanese is counted as one year at the university level.)
- The essay’s topic must be either “The Great East Japan Earthquake (東日本大震災について思うこと)” or “Cherry Trees” (私にとって「桜」とは).
- Any topic is acceptable for the speech.
- Both the essay and speech must be written in Japanese.
- Both the essay and speech must be typed.
- The length of the essay or speech should be no more than 800 characters. Essays or speeches which do not conform to the character limit will be disqualified. Students must write their name and the title of their essay or speech on the page, neither of which will count toward the 800 character limit.
- Entries will not be returned.
- Finalists of the speech contest will be notified individually by the first week of April. Speech contest finalists will compete at the Japanese Language Contest on April 21, 2012 in the Boston area.
Essay contest winners will also be notified individually by the first week of April. Essay contest winners will be invited to read their essay at the competition.
- Copyright of all essays and speech will be retained by the Consulate General of Japan in Boston.
- Only previously unpublished essays and speech will be accepted.
- If plagiarism is found, the entry will be disqualified.