I took this photo on the way to school. This is a Chinese restaurant located in E 12th avenue so it is right outside of school. But I haven’t been inside of the restaurant yet. I assume 楓林小館 means maple garden restaurant in English. In this class, we learned that most of the Chinese characters have two elements. For example, 楓 can be separated into two characters. Radical here is 木     which is written in a simplified form. This means the tree in Chinese. Left one, 風 means wind in Chinese. So in this case, we can guess 楓 means maple. Each Chinese character represents a morpheme (a small unit of meaning) and can create compound words.

The second one is a miso soup that duck sore are selling on the campus. This product is a great example of how Japanese mixes both kanji and Hiragana in one word. From the design of the package, I can guess that aka miso means red soybean and this kanji “汁” means soup. Since they are written in red, non-native Japanese speaker can guess that this product contain something red inside.

So far, I am really enjoying this class. I don’t take notes in the class because professor idemaru goes pretty fast. I go over slides after the class to review the lecture and I think this is helping me a lot to understand the concept in this class. For me, the Chinese writing system is a little bit complicated to understand. But reading assignments, iclicker questions, and quizzes sometimes help me to understand some hard stuff.