This picture is taken in front of an Asian market named “亞洲龍,” a Chinese grocery store nearby campus. I always go there to buy some snakes, instant noodles, and quick-frozen food. There are some Chinese characters in the picture written in traditional characters; they can be simplified as“亚洲龙.”“亚洲”/ “亞洲” means Asian, and “龙”/ “龍” means dragon. Dragon is a god-like animal in the ancient myths and legends of East Asia, especially in China, and is often used to symbolize auspiciousness. It is significantly different from the western dragon, which represents greed and destruction. Therefore, the meaning of this grocery market’s name is to make a wish, to be a lucky Asian market.

The connection between this picture and our class is that the character “洲” is a compound character. “氵” is the radical part to represent meaning, which means water, and “州” is a phonetic element that represents intended pronunciation. What’s more, “亞洲龍”/ “亚洲龙” is written from left to right, which is same as the writing order of simplified characters.

I’ve learned a lot about language history and language uses about Chinese, Japanese, and Korean as well as their writing system. I’m struggling with honorifics in Japanese. The speech style seems complicated for me and hard to understand. And for the reading materials, I thought I understand the article well, but sometimes I still cannot get a full point for the online quizzes. Iclicker quizzes work well for me, and the points make me confuse can easily stand out. I’m looking forward to taking the rest of the class, and I am interested in the topic “English in East Asia” and the guest lecture “Chinese medicine” so much.