I think we should start off with a thread listing any available chinese idioms and proverbs, to benefit those who wish to learn or improve their chinese. Chinese Idioms, known as "Cheng Yu 成语", are usually consisted of 4 chinese characters. Chinese proverbs, known as "Yan Yu 谚语", on the other hand, have more than 4 characters and usually can be in the form of sentence structure.

Having a good knowledge of chinese idioms and proverbs can advance your command of the chinese language, and if you use it often in daily conversation, people will tend to think you have a good command of the chinese language and your chinese is good. Most chinese tend to incorporate chinese idioms in their daily conversation, ranging from very common idioms to the more unknown idioms.

Note that when posting an idiom, please also include the explanation (translation if possible), and any example of a sentence to allow one to learn how to apply and use it. If you wish to include the historical origin of the idiom, you can also do it.

I'll just start off with a simple idiom.

隔岸观火

Pinyin: Ge2 An4 Guan1 Huo3

Meaning:

"Looking across the bank and observing the fire" . It means across the bank, there is a fire, but one just do nothing, only observing the fire. It has the sarcastic meaning of implying a person doing nothing when someone is in trouble.

Example Sentence:

都着火了, 你怎么还在隔岸观火, 不去救火呢?

It's already on fire, why are you still standing here and doing nothing to save the fire?

Anymore idioms to contribute? Please post.

惊跋落屎礐　毋惊火燒厝

Saying some people are so worried about falling into the sh!t hole and dirty their clothes because they will lose face. But they are not worried when their house is on fire.

Example: 我當然唄隔岸觀火，彼个人本來就是惊跋落屎礐，毋惊火燒厝。

hey guys... first day member here...

just wondering if any of you could help me out... I was wondering whether anyone knew 2 four charcter idioms that when combined meant something along the lines of "No victory without courage"...

so far (from very limitted resources) i've only been able to scrounge up...

"one body of courage" --> "unrivaled everywhere"

literal translation: "one body is guts" --> "whatever face no enemy"

Any sort of help/advise/expertise would be appreciated. Thanks everybody. I look forward to hearing from you.

I've got the perfect one for you:

不入虎穴 [Without entering the tiger's den]

不得虎子[One cannot capture the tiger's cub]

(also commonly rendered as 不入虎穴, 焉得虎子- meaning "Without entering the tiger's den, how does one capture the tiger's cub?")

The origin of this proverb is the 5th-century Houhan Shu 后汉书, specifically its biography of the 1st-century general Ban Chao 班超, who restored Eastern Han control over the Silk Road.

Ban Chao and 36 subordinates were on a diplomatic mission to the kingdoms of the Tarim Basin, and first arrived at the kingdom of Kroran (also known as Loulan 楼兰 or Shanshan 鄯善). The king at first gave them a warm reception, but after some time, he began to be cold and rude towards them. Ban Chao investigated and found that a large Xiongnu delegation had also arrived, so that the king's attitude towards the Han dynasty had begun to waver .

Ban Chao assembled his men and told them that the situation was grave - if the king decided to ally with the Xiongnu, they would probably be handed over to the Xiongnu as a gesture of the king's sincerity. Arguing that "without entering the tiger's den, one cannot capture the tiger's cub", Ban Chao decided that the only solution was to risk everything in a sneak attack on the Xiongnu delegation that night.

At night, Ban Chao and his 36 men snuck up to the Xiongnu camp. Ten of them hid behind the camp with drums, while the others lay in ambush with weapons at either side in front of the camp. Then they set a fire right outside the camp and began shouting and beating drums at the same time. The Xiongnu woke up in confusion and panicked, thinking a large Han army was attacking them. When they tried to flee, many fell into Ban Chao's ambush. Over 30 of them were killed in the ambush, including the leader of the delegation. More than a hundred others were killed by the fire.

The next day, Ban Chao met the king of Kroran and showed him the severed head of the Xiongnu leader. The king then decided to ally with the Eastern Han.

thnx so much for the reply... i think i can make that one work for me

however, do u no any more 8 character phrases similar in meaning that are constructed from 2 independent idioms?

i'm hoping to get a caligrapher to write out the two phrases on two separate mattes. that way they both have meaning while standing alone but come together to form a phrase meaning "no victory without courage"

i was under the assumption that the mixing and matching of idioms/proverbs to construct deeper meaning was typical. erronious?

thnx again

You can try this two simple idioms which denote 'courage':

奋不顾身 [Drive forward without caring about one's body safety]
勇往直前 [Drive forward courageously]




Do be careful. On chinese calligraphy, I guess you're referring to writing a couplet instead of 2 lines of idioms forming two lines.

Couplets are generally short poems consisting of two sections. These two sections are often connected by their sentence structure. Verb, noun, adjectives, etc must correspond between the sections. So if the first character of the first section is a noun, so must the first charactrer of the second section. Often, the two must also correspond (or opposite) with each other in terms of their overall theme. So if the first section is about your family, you can't give a 2nd section about wooden chairs (unless of course, if it is somehow related to the family theme).

So, even if you come up with two chinese idioms to form one line for a couplet. The other line must also correspond correctly.

As far as I see, the best couplet I can think of that denote "no victory without courage" should be:

涌志凌云, 气驾山河 (Wield the Will to ride the cloud, Courage cross the mountains and rivers)

乘风破浪, 鹏程万里 (Ride the wind and break the cloud, the bird ride millions of miles)

青出于蓝胜于蓝
qing chu yu lan shen yu lan

不见棺材不流泪
bu jian guan cai bu liu lei

thnx for the transcription

i speak the cantonese dialect, so reading this pingying always gives me trouble

can someone help me out with the literal and figurative translation of this phrases?

thanks in advance.

Literally,

Black is derived from blue but is darker

Not weeping until one sees one's coffin

Translated as:

The student surpasses the teacher

Refusing to repent until suffering a disaster

I don't think either of these are appropriate for the occasion

I'm interested in why you chose to translate 青 as black, instead of a green or azure or an alternate blue color. the original phrase from which the idiom is derived is from xunzi's quanxue:

青、取之於藍而青於藍; 冰、水為之而寒於水.

as we can see, the two phrases are parallel to each other. in the second phrase, water is the source of ice but ice is colder than water. it would seem to imply that in the first phrase, 青 is also a close relative of 藍, which would seem to rule out 青 being black.

another interpretation of mine: 青 is 'the color' while 藍 is the plant from which the color is derived. but the derivative color/pigment is actually even 'greener/bluer' than the color of the original plant (藍). come to think of it, this makes more sense.

what do you think?

I've posted in
http://www.chinahistoryforum.com/index.php...t&p=4822724

that for the idiom 青、取之於藍而青於藍, "青" (green) actually refers to the 'student' while 藍 (blue) actually refers to the 'teacher'. Why such colour was used I'm not too sure..but indeed, that idiom was derived from Xunzi's Quanxue.

The link below is to an excellent site on Chinese proverbs. It was compiled by Yuan Haiwang a Library faculty member and Chinese language teacher at my alma mater, Western Kentucky University. There are a lot of great proverbs on the site; it's "sticky" worthy if you ask me.


http://www.wku.edu/~yuanh/China/proverb.html

Thankyou for sharing that site with us, JohnD. It's just fantastic!