Every Sunday from second grade through highschool, I trekked to Chinese school at Emory University, a place my parents insisted would bridge the cultural dissonance of growing up in a predominately White suburb in Decatur. While my lessons started from cute rhymes, greetings, and riddles, in fifth grade my teacher introduced idioms, or 成语(cheng2 yu3). A type of Chinese idiomatic expression, chengyu are sayings passed down over the centuries that evoke a story, or additional meaning, from their constituent words. I might say 人山人海, which directly translates to “people mountains people river,” or 卧虎藏龙, which translates to “crouching tiger hiding dragon.” A common part of vernacular Chinese today, chengyu pack a lot of meaning into themselves. Words often get lost in translation, and I am afraid that might be the case here.
However, I will try my best to portray the nuance packed within these phrases :)
follow the typical subject, verb, object structure
four characters long
said on their own
Mostly derived from ancient literature, chengyu originate from pre-Qin classics, ancient poetry, and late imperial vernacular novels and short stories. The earliest chengyu drew from the lyrical imagery from the Shijing, a collection of poetry from the 11th-7th centuries BCE, and the vivid stories recorded in the Zuozhuan, China’s first great record of history. In the Shijing, poems consist of four-character lines - as a result, some chengyu are direct quotes from the novel. More commonly, chengyu are created by paraphrasing or summarizing original texts, where people select the most salient characters from a passage.
All of this means that chengyu are fossilized expressions of the Chinese language, and as a result, they convey information more compactly than normal vernacular writing and speech. Chengyu can be found as adjectives, verbs, nouns, and more, and they may act as an independent clause by themselves, with a subject and predicate of their own. Just as Chinese idioms are as vibrant and diverse as the stories they come from, each chengyu has its own history, and I will delve into some as I go.
画蛇添足
huàshé tiānzú
Draw snake add feet
Describes how a superfluous element can ruin something, like how snakes don’t have legs. As the folk story goes, a painter finished his painting of a snake first, but when he saw others still sketching, he continued working and added feet. This detail made him lose the contest.
Example: 对此加以评论，将是画蛇添足
人山人海
rén shān rén hǎi
People mountain people sea
Describes huge crowds of people, where a place has so many people they somehow look like a mountain or a sea. For example, any tourist site in China looks like a sea of people during the holidays.
Example: 今天人山人海，我们明天去吧。
对牛弹琴
Duì niú tán qín
To cow, play piano
Describes a deep conversation with an ignorant person, just as there is no point playing piano to a cow. The story goes: during the Warring States period, renowned musician Gongming Yi once played the lute to a cow. However, the cow kept grazing the grass and eventually wandered away.
Example: 我每天嘱咐你好好学习，简直是对牛弹琴啊。
春和景明
Chūn hé jǐngmíng
Spring mix scene clear
Describes how a superfluous element can ruin something, like how snakes don’t have legs. As the folk story goes, a painter finished his painting of a snake first, but when he saw others still sketching, he continued working and added feet. This detail made him lose the contest.
Example: 至若春和景明，波瀾不驚
卧虎藏龙
Wò hǔ cáng long
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
Describes hidden talents, where the guise of a crouching tiger hides the dragon underneath. Here, people may seem unassuming, when in fact they are strong and powerful. A more modern idiom, this phrase derives from Ang Lee’s 2000 movie Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.
Example: 至若春和景明，波瀾不驚
掩耳盗铃
Yǎn ěr dào líng
Yǎn ěr dào líng
Cover ear steal bell
Describes when someone deceives themselves. In the Qin Dynasty, a thief hoped to steal a bell. Because it was too large, he smashed it into smaller pieces and covered his ears to hide the sound. The whole town heard, and he got caught.
Example: 我们都应实事求是，不可掩耳盗铃，自欺欺人
Chengyu work because they take a longer sentence and make it shorter. While direct translations into English sound like garbled, incomplete sentences, this briefness - for many Chinese listeners - adds a kind of wisdom to them. Chengyu continue to be an integral part of Chinese life, from vernacular language to the cultural history it nods to. This is but a small tribute to the phenomenon Chinese idioms have become today, but I hope it serves as a stepping stone into the subject for as diverse and nuanced it is :).
Web Page Design by EILEEN CHEN