成語 Chéngyǔ: Chinese idioms
Published by marco on
“Chengyu (traditional Chinese: 成語; simplified Chinese: 成语; pinyin: chéngyǔ; trans. “set phrase”) are a type of traditional Chinese idiomatic expressions, most of which consist of four Chinese characters. Chengyu were widely used in Literary Chinese and are still common in written vernacular Chinese writing and in the spoken language today. According to the most stringent definition, there are about 5,000 chengyu in the Chinese language, though some dictionaries list over 20,000. Chengyu are considered the collected wisdom of the Chinese culture, and contain the experiences, moral concepts, and admonishments from previous generations of Chinese speakers.”
- 井底之蛙 (jǐng dǐ zhī wā): a frog in the bottom of the well / a person with limited outlook
- 三人成虎 (sān rén chéng hǔ): Three men make a tiger / repeated rumor becomes a fact
- 紙上談兵 (zhǐ shàng tán bīng): talk about military tactics on paper / theoretical discussion useless in practice (I like our “armchair generals” or “armchair quarterbacks” idiom better.)
- 畫蛇添足 (huà shé tiān zú): to add feet when drawing a snake / to improve something unnecessarily
- 易如反掌 (yì rú fǎn zhǎng): as easy as turning over one’s hand / for something to be very easy (This one’s the same in German: Handumdrehen)
I like some of these because they’re more intuitive than something like bikeshedding (performing a seemingly endless series of small tasks to avoid more complex steps that would actually move the project forward) or yak-shaving (spending most of your time discussing the simple but trivial issues rather than focusing your time on discussions around the bigger but harder tasks at hand) because you honestly don’t have to explain it to anyone who knows what a snake is.
“Putting lipstick on a pig”
Now there’s an English idiom I can get behind.