How do you write Nano is the largest in Chinese?

[kasse]

How can I write

"Nano is the largest"

with Chinese characters?

 

[chemisttree]

Babelfish gives me, "納諾最大". Real easy, just four box-shaped characters means "Nano is the largest" in Chinese. Sounds like an easy language to learn.

 

[kasse]

Not quite. You've got to learn thousands of characters. And they are not very readable either.

 

[Flat]

Not quite. You've got to learn thousands of characters. And they are not very readable either.

But they are boxed shaped.

 

[rootX]

大 looks like a human. Humans are large ..so 大 is large or big (my assumption)

I guess most of characters go like that. There is a meaning for each character.

 

[junglebeast]

The fewer the characters that are necessary to represent something, the more characters will be needed in the language, and the more complex each character will need to be in order to disambiguate them!

 

[millitiz]

@rootX
You are partially right ;). In fact, most of the elements of our everyday life (say, sun, moon, rivers, etc) are in this form of "It meant what it looks like." But there are 4 different types of ways to form characters, and this is only one of them. And since this is a physics forum and not a chinese one, I'll stop it right here =)
@Flat.
Even as an ethnic chinese guy, sometimes there are words I do not know/ have never seen before (and of course there is no way for me to pronounce it. Yea, unlike English, or any alphabetical language which you can kinda "guess" the pronunciation by looking at the spelling, you pretty much to need know how to pronounce each characters in Chinese). And there are many things one can do with that tiny box!
@Chemisttree
Well, maybe it is. But I have heard that the grammer structure of Chinese is REALLY terrible, so it might be hard to learn the grammer. This I don't really know 0_0
Btw, Nano is the largest, is probably best translated in
"奈米是最大的"
The point of 納諾最大 is that, it does not have verb, and 納諾 is not really a good, authentic translation =D

 

[millitiz]

@ Chemisttree.
Just a few more things. Actually, technically speaking, 納諾最大 is understandable. So I guess it is "legal" to kinda take away the verb (which wouldn't make sense grammatically).
And one more fact which illustrates the poor structure/ ambiguity of Chinese Structure.
So in English, verbs changes "form" according to time. ie, future tense, past tense, etc.
However, in Chinese, they all look the same. That is to say, without any extra indication in the same sentence, there was no way to tell when the event happens (it could be in the future as well as the past).

 

[Jimmy Snyder]

大 looks like a human. Humans are large ..so 大 is large or big (my assumption)

I guess most of characters go like that. There is a meaning for each character.

It is a stylized image of a person standing with arms stretched out as in a fish story. Most characters are not constructed in this fashion. The written language is more phonetic than you might expect.

 

[kevin1123]

"Nano is the largest" means "奈米是最大的"..

"Nano" means "奈米" in chinese = 10-9 m unit.