I never expected to be learning Mandarin from a McDonald's paper bag. [I had a salad, promise!] OK, so it is hardly a major academic achievement, but I have to admit to being fair excited when I realised I recognised the 我 wǒ character on the multilingual "I'm lovin' it" logo of McDonald's! Having done a bit of investigation the other characters include 喜欢 xǐhuan, one of the words used for "love" when talking about things or activities. I wonder what the 2nd character is...
Update
On a mission to "unlock the code" that is recognising Chinese characters I started off by looking at the Wikipedia list of Chinese radicals to see if I could identify the characters which made up the missing character. This proved too difficult - I don't really understand the radicals enough yet. So, Googled "我 喜欢 McDonalds" (wǒ xǐhuan) and found a few references where I recognised the 2nd characted. I then headed over to Chinese-tools.com to the Chinese text to pinyin convertor and entered the four characters, 我就喜欢, and all was explained: the missing link was the character 就, in pinyin jiù. As a follow up, I tried I couple of online translators* and the combination of 我就喜欢 wǒ jiù xǐhuan seems to give "I like", which I guess fits in with the McDonald's theme!
If any native Mandarin speakers want to give a better translation of 我就喜欢, please feel free to post a comment! And I was going to say no to the McDonald's lunch to be more healthy! Still glad I had the salad... ;)
Here's the full logo, now that I know the four characters:
*I would stress that I'm NOT suggesting that the use of online translators is an effective method of getting an accurate translation, but they can help sometimes in confirming meanings as long as they're used carefully!
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