Here’s a great way to learn Chinese idioms. This site gives you one Chinese idiom per day and offers an English translation.
Today’s expression is jiu niu yi mao, literally ‘meaning nine cows, one hair’. It implies that one hair between nine cows is insignificant. Er, yep. The English equivalent is ‘a drop in the ocean’.
There are thousands of Chinese idioms, known as cheng yu. You need to be careful when studying them because many of the cheng yu you see inthe textbooks are obscure and not used very much. This is a major deal - with limited it is essential to make your study relevant and useful. That’s a big element of what we try to do for our learners at ChinesePod. I’ll get Jenny on the case to see how relevant these expressions are.
Ken Carroll 凯恩
Thanks for this link - it really hit the spot. Just yesterday I suggested somewhere else in this blog that chengyu might be a neat addition to chinesepod, possibly as an extra series of segments available for one-click or per click download (this must have been in the discussion about the price of chinese lessons) Getting to know which ones are used commonly, and how they are used would be great!
One a day! That’s too much. I’ll wait for you guys to distill them down to one a month - just the essential or (linguistically) highly illuminating ones.
很好！谢谢你 :)
I’d also vote for staying away from the chenyu. It’s an enticing idea and many Chinese will recommend it, but in practical terms they are sparsely used, hence easily forgetable, and don’t allow one to build much upon them in terms of having any grammar. It’s a nice ‘hobby’ but I think not core to learning the language per se.
Common phrases, however, now these are useful: 你疯了！ ni3 feng1 le ; You’re crazy!
To make it a little more academic you might review that the charcter feng for wind is within the sick radical, and talk about the social-context in which this is used. Maybe note the le as a grammar marker.
In fact, cheng yu are used all the time by native Madarin speakers. However, they are difficult to learn.
We have to consider our ‘return on out study investment’, as it were. Cheng yu have a low ROI, so we’re going to leave them for the upper intermediate levels and be very selective about the ones we choose. For now, high frequency vocabulary items (particlularly phrases and lexical chunks) are of far greater use to our learnesr.
I think cheng yu do have a cultural value, if not always a practical one, for any learner of Mandarin. It’s interesting to see some of them - hence the link to that site.