Hii, I wanted to make this post since I’ve been having a lot of trouble with all the 大 related vocabulary, specifically 大きい, 大した, 大きさ and 大いに. I always mistake the meaning of one for another and I’m unsure of which one is which.
Would appreciate if anyone could give me some advice or a way of getting them right, thanks .
大きい is big, and 大きさ is size.
This happens with some other qualitative adjectives:
An easy example would be 長い (long) and 長さ (length) or 高い (high) and 高さ (height).
You also usually hear stuff like 大したことない “It’s not a big deal.” (and a lot more vocabulary) in anime or series, so watching stuff in Japanese will help you with telling stuff apart.
Yeah I watch a lot of anime but I never paid attention to what they actually were saying, now, when that I’ve learned some words I sometimes hear them, though some slip away too hehe. Will try to pay more attention!
-に is a common adverb suffix, so you can often think of it as meaning “with~”: For 大いに I think “with bigness”, i.e. “very”. Not to be confused with 大きく “in a big way” .
To make it less confusing, you could try thinking of 大いに as 多い + に, and use the “a lot of” definition, which is pretty similar to 多い.