Blog post 2

This picture was taken in the 3rd floor of Oregon hall. It was quite awkward taking this picture, I don’t believe the people at the desk understood what I was doing. However, you gotta do what you gotta do, and I did.

This is Japanese text, and I believe it is talking about a job fair for bilingual people. I would assume this is referring to specifically Japanese ESL students, so that’s pretty cool. The kanji all the way on the right also says “the biggest in the world!” or something to that effect. I think it is interesting how these posters are written, often just kind of throwing words at you like “job fair” and “bilingual” without trying to make a complete sentence. Because it’s not really a complete sentence, there’s not a lot of room to be polite in the traditional sense that we are learning about in class. It kind of gets me wondering, is this poster being rude? I wonder how this poster would hit a Japanese person’s eyes, I doubt it would be considered rude, but there’s nothing that would make it polite, and I would think that the absence of politeness can be considered rude in some ways.

Then again, as someone who is a native speaker of English, I see a similar format in flyers like this, and I don’t even think twice about it. I guess it’s just trying to give you as much information as it can, and not really caring about politeness or good grammar. Pretty interesting.

Anyways I like this class, it’s pretty interesting. I find it pretty cool to see the comparisons between these 3 big languages and how they are similar and at the same time very different. The class is pretty interesting to me too because I am in Japanese at the same time. Sometimes I’ll even learn about something in this class (like keigo) before even hearing about it in Japanese class. Pretty neat.

I think I’m doing fine in this class, everything makes sense, but I guess I’ll know for sure after the midterm.

Hello Class

My name is Casey, I’m a freshman and I went to South Eugene High school. I’ve lived in Eugene since I was in 1st grade and really like it here. I plan on majoring in Japanese, maybe with a minor in education. My dream is to teach English in Japan. Because of this, this class seemed like it would be a great fit for me. I’ve also always been interested in linguistics, and not so interested in romance languages, so this class really seemed interesting to me.

Here’s some pictures of my pet snake, he’s a pacific gopher snake, and can be kind of dramatic at times.

I’m really interested in the linguistics aspect of this class, and like the format of the lectures. Giving points for answering questions during the lectures is kind of weird but I like it. This class seems like a good challenge for me. At times it feels like I’m cheating because I know some Japanese, but then again I think there are people in this class that speak Japanese, Korean, and Chinese, and those are the real cheaters. I think that the reading quizzes is also a pretty good system. I prefer it to just having to “read from this page to this page”. Overall I really look forward to this class and college in general. I’ve been looking forward to college because I get to chose classes that I’m interested in, and this seems like a perfect example of that.