I found two examples of East Asian writing and I think these two are kind of same so I’m going to talk about them together. The first recruitment poster is in the psychology department located in the Straub Hall, and the second picture I took at a comic bookstore in Springfield.

The first poster has both Chinese characters and Japanese kanji and hiragana while in the second picture, I assume,  they are all Japanese kanji. Chinese characters are logographic and hiragana is both phonographic and syllabic. On the upper left of the poster is Chinese writing, which is SVO; and on the upper right is Japanese writing, which is SOV and left-branching. The reason why the poster uses Chinese and Japanese writing is that the participants of this research should be either Chinese or Japanese native speakers, so by using these two writings, the native speakers could find and participate in the research easily. For the second picture, I think it used kanji is because the products are imported from Japan and by writing in kanji, it can be observed by customers easier.

In this class, I find that taking notes with a notebook but not laptop helps me concentrate. Even though I am a native Chinese speaker I find something interesting and I didn’t before about Chinese. For example, I never thought deeply about classifiers and aspect markers, which I find I learned a lot from the class. When learning the sound system of Japanese and Korean, I feel that I can try to “sound like” Japanese or Korean and engage with the materials the most. Overall, I think the lecture is interesting and engaging, it gives me a fully-detailed explanation about the three languages and cultures. I enjoy taking this class.