Speech competitions may be an interesting way to practice and get some critiques of your speaking ability and a fun way to really put yourself out there and force you to grow as a speaker.
Here are some videos of people doing there speech competitions. These are all gaijin’s doing speeches.
I took a look at some of the criteria for judging for one speech contest they were.
- Content
- Pronunciation
- Presentation
- Memorization
- Expression
- Delivery
From various competitions I looked at around the internet it looks like most competitions are sponsored by Japanese Embassies. Being that I have never considered there to even be speech competitions for Japanese not sure if this is normal or not, but interesting non-the-less.
What was real funny is one of the applications, not all, had a waiver and mentions specifically falling and suffering severe bodily injury they are not liable. Not sure if I would want to go to that particular competition.
Looking through many competitions it also looks like most of the competitions, at least in the US, are for non-native speakers; or they have 2 categories. I think it would be better, personally, to pit up against native speakers or at the very least where parents do speak Japanese. Gives us that learn from scratch a bit more of a challenge.
Some of the awards I saw were really cool anything from $1000 cash to full year scholarship for college. Don’t remember which one, but there was one offering a job if you won and fit the other criteria. Basically the speech was the interview.
So the question now is would you ever consider doing a speech in Japanese?
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
I'd never really paid any attention to Japanese speech competitions until I ran across this http://bit.ly/mPYYw just recently at a local university where I'm taking an introductory course. I plan on attending as a spectator and am very curious as to how the participants will fare. Sounds pretty intriguing to me but I don't think I could ever compete like this. Too much pressure : (
I can understand that for sure especially being non-native speaker would be nerve-racking. Yeah the competitions are definitely something you don't think about, at least in my case, until you hear about it for the first time.
I've competed in two speech competitions for Japanese. Here is my speech from one in 2008, in which I placed 4th. I competed again in 2009 and got first in the city and state competitions, that video will come out sometime later this week. Recognize me?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SEZ7-DdF_hk
It was actually off of your video that I got the idea for this post. I was thinking about adding your video, but instead opted for the actual competition. I liked your topic too. Did it help your japanese a lot to do the speech competitions?