I thought i would try to learn to read Chinese characters. I saw a thing somewhere once that said characters are organized by the number of brush-strokes in them, so in the past you kinda had to already know what you were looking up to find anything on it. I got the internet though!
世 - this is the first character I learned, and according to Google translate, it means ‘world’. Wiktionary says it means other things to, like ‘society’, ‘generation’, even ‘woman’ and ‘marriage’?? those last two feel like they’re more contextual.
[stolen from wiktionary]
seeing it written out, it makes me think first of the horizon, with pillars or towers rising above it. shadows extend from them. it makes me think if how people discovered/verified the curve of the Earth by measuring shadows, so it seems fitting.
The next one I’ve learned is “大”, which appears to be a suffix meaning ‘big/much/very’. it’s supposed to look like a little guy with arms stretched out to emphasis how BIG something is! …again, going on Wiktionary for this…
Which gives me
世大 - BIG WORLD (google thinks this says university…)
or, alternatively
Very Society :marx-joker:
…am i doing this right? Or, at least, not terribly wrong? I kinda wanna hit the point where I can read Mao or Three Body Problem in the original text.
(obligatory “I am not Chinese”)
So the reason Google thinks that 世大 says “World University” is because it interprets 大 as an abbreviation of 大学 which means university (学 means study/school, so 大学 = big school). Abbreviating 大学 as just 大 is a common practice with university names, cf. “U” in English.
To figure out how to translate “big world” into Chinese, let’s look at the right placard of Tiananmen.
世界人民大团结万岁 — “long live the great unity of the peoples of the world”
This sentence breaks down like so
世界 - world
人民 - people
大团结 - great unity
万岁 - long live
So we see in 大团结 that 大 comes before rather than after 团结, so you were mistaken to think that 大 was a suffix.
And you might also notice that if you got rid of the 大 that every single word in that sentence is exactly two characters long: 世界・人民・团结・万岁. The reason for this has to do with how limited the syllables of Chinese are, so single-character words are actually fairly rare: 世 is read as shì in Standard Chinese, but there are dozens of other characters which are also read as shì, so in speech it becomes confusing to have too many single-character words like that. This is why the Chinese word for “world” is 世界 rather than just 世 or 界, even though both of those characters by themselves can already mean “world”.
The magic word here is “morpheme” — ABChinese made a whole YouTube video series explaining the deals with single-character and two-character words in Chinese: part 1 ・ part 2 ・ part 3
In any case, if you take all of this together, you would understand that “big world” or “great world” would be 大世界 in Chinese — which, wouldn’t you know, is actually the name of a famous amusement arcade in Shanghai, the Great World!
I found YouTube links in your comment. Here are links to the same videos on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
Link 1:
Link 2:
Link 3: