A beginner question about understanding 大きさ

Japanese Language
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So, the WaniKani explanation for this vocab didn’t really stick with me. I thought about it for a while and came up with a way to explain it to myself. I just want to know if my thinking is flawed or if there is some better way to understand this.

WaniKani said that while おおきい means big, replacing the い with さ means size. So in my mind, it feels like adding the さ means the scale or thing your measuring.

For example, there’s the scale of small → big, but the overall scale would be size itself. Would this be accurate?

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さ is a suffix that means something like “-ness”. In the case of 大きさ it would mean something like “bigness”, but size would sound more natural in English.

Or as Jisho puts it:

nominalizing suffix indicating degree or condition

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I would recommend reading this short bit from Tae Kim’s Guide on さ . And dammit @athomasm gotta Leebo me like that.

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Thank you very much for the quick reply! It makes a lot more sense now. :slight_smile:

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Thank you for the link! I’ll take a look right now.

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No problem. In addition to the Tae Kim link there is also this Imabi section on this:

It has a bit more in the way of examples as well.

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