I think I am going to put longer spaces between each update, as when I write them only 2 weeks apart, I don't really have all that much to say.  These last two weeks have been good, and my reading and general survey midterms seemed to go pretty well.  General survey was open book, and so it was very straight forward.  Class last week was tough, as we moved into some general history.  Apparently next semester we have a dedicated history class which will go into much more detail.  I am looking forward to that, but the content is difficult because of our Chinese level.  Both our general survey and character study classes have a lot of content that is way above our level, but have to be taught to us by law. 

The highlight from this week was my character study class.  This class started out quite difficult (but very interesting) with mythology about where characters came from.  But these last two classes have gotten incredibly helpful, as we have been looking at the different types of characters.  I had read people saying that it's best to start out by learning all the radicals when learning characters, and I don't know whether I agree with that or not (I didn't do it that way).  But at this point, understanding the composition of 形声字, 会意字 etc., is so helpful for me.  Whereas I would previously look at a 形声字 and try to understand where the meaning came from, it now makes total sense that part of the character is relating the meaning, while the other part is the sound.  My method of trying to understand a character was completely misinformed, as I had no understanding of the ways in which characters are formed!