I got a Chinese baby book a few days ago, a glossy board book with simple characters and pin yin and English. (We’ll ignore the premise that the intended readership is someone who can read all three, but is still liable to chew on the book)
It’s been pretty helpful with my character recognition, until I got to this:
Do we really need 7 strokes to say “triangle”? Can’t we do it in three?
Obviously the dude who invented that character was thinking about Hilbert space at the time…
…
NOT.
I think the character probably had other meanings.
Why wasn’t this simplified to a triangle when Simplified Mandarin became standard?
Oh I just remembered something, jiao means angle! It’s not simply triangle!
So San Jiao means tri-angle. It’s a combination of the word for three, and the word for angle.
Your book is messed up! HAHA. Where you buy it?
Jiao means angle, e.g wu jiao da luo, the Pentagon. Ba jiao, octagon?
Are you learning Chinese? How long time do you learn Chinese and mandarin? Do you want to know your current level and achievement? I suggest you spend 5 minutes to know your Chinese level through watching a video on http://hello-mandarin.blogspot.com
I’m with you that it probably just means angle… but then I find it odd that “angle” is one of the characters in the baby book, with basics like numbers, up and down, the seasons, and some animals.
PS Chinese study advisor, you really need to stop spamming my blog. Also, advisor has an O.