This photo was taken on West 11th Ave outside of Gravity Auto Group and is written in Chinese characters.

The characters in the picture read 聚点车行, and one way this connects to what we’ve learned in class is that Chinese characters are logographic, as a single character indicates the meaning of a word. An example in this photo is 车 being used to indicate that this location’s primary purpose has to do with vehicles. This company likely uses Chinese since many Chinese exchange students purchase cars when they relocate to Eugene, and the area was fairly close to campus.

I feel that I am engaging with the material most when I take the quizzes on Canvas, since I will read the article it is attached to and reread it again once I take the quiz to double check my answers. However I feel that I learn the most during the lectures, when Professor Idemaru can go further into detail and explain lesson points, such as describing differences between language structures such as SOV and SVO word order. One topic that intrigues me is the use of metaphor in East Asian languages and how they develop. Though we discussed some examples in class, I’m curious as to how certain metaphors develop and which ones may be culture specific. I will do more outside research on this topic as well.