Okay, vacation’s over.  Time to get back to work.

A. 雨　B. 風　C. 雷　D. 霧　E. 雲　F. 晴　G. 雪

Some of you may have noticed that many of these characters contained a shared element, identified by Shirley as “the cloud.”  It is, in fact, a compressed version of character A, which means rain.  Now, as I may have mentioned before, if you see a part of a kanji character that you recognize from another one that you already know, you can guess that they have similar meanings, though since I told you these were all weather-related, that probably wouldn’t help much.  And also, shared elements sometimes indicate similar pronunciation rather than similar meaning, so it’s a tricky process at best.  However, none of that has anything to do with wind, one of only two characters here to not include the rain radical (a term used to refer to parts that show up in multiple characters, such as in this example).  Wind is B.  Nobody got it.  Better luck next time.

This is not to say, however, that none of you got anything correct.  Shirley, who boldly set out to take stabs at all of them, walked away with a decent score–though I regret to inform her that “This time, No rhyme.  Except that one.” is not a haiku, as the haiku form is one of three lines of five, seven, and five syllables.  She picked out rain right off the bat, one of the few easily identifiable kanji characters, in my opinion (it looks like rain falling outside a window).  She missed the next couple, though I award partial credit for her guess of “radio” for C, because C is thunder, which is caused by lightning, which is a form of electricity, without which radios could not function.  She also gets partial credit for guessing “hail” for D, even though the character means “fog,” because I was considering using the character for hail instead.  E, A Fan’s flying hibachi, is a cloud, and F was correctly identified by Shirley as meaning “sunny.”  I almost tripped up Dragon by throwing in a character with a backwards E in order to get her to accidentally guess E, though you might wonder why I bothered, as neither answer was correct.  G is the weather my hometown is best known for: snow.

50 points to Theoman for locking himself in the house and trying to avoid all this weather.  That’s the only smart thing to do.

I’ve been thinking a fair amount about going back to school recently, so this week we’re going to have a back-to-school themed puzzle.  The following is a list of things you can study in school.  Now, this may seem like a lot of characters to deal with at first, but really it’s not so bad.  Notice how five of the six end with the same kanji? That just means “study” or “learning,” so for the purposes of this quiz you can basically ignore it.  Anyway, go ahead and pick out from the list the one discipline in which I never took a class in college, which, in this case, will be political science.

A. 外国語 B. 心理学 C. 数学 D. 政治学 E. 文学 F. 歴史学