Studying Chengyu

[Murray]

I've been studying Chinese for three years now and after my first visit to China last year, I've been wanting to take my Chinese skill to the next level. After arriving back home, I was disappointed that after all this time, there's so much about Mandarin I don't know and need to work on.

Since then, I've been putting major emphasis on grammar, reading/writing, speaking and trying to master tones, but it occurred to me that for the most part, chengyu was something I was completely in the dark about.

Now, I have studied four character idioms in the past (not sure if those are the exact same thing as chengyu though) through various text books. A couple that I can remember off the top of my head are 望子成龙 and 舞蹈弄枪. While those were interesting to learn, they really haven't been useful in my day to day usage of Chinese. After learning them, there were times I used them when we were having class discussions on the chapter in class, but they haven't appeared on any of the tests and it's not as if they're entirely applicable in daily conversations with my laoshi or Chinese friends.

There're chengyu and idiom dictionaries I've come across that are relatively cheap (around $2-$10) but I wouldn't feel comfortable spending even that small amount of money on something that won't pay off or even be of use if it's more beneficial to just not worry about it in the long run. I'm well aware that a large part of the decision depends on my personal language goals; I met expats who've lived in China for decades who only know enough Chinese to hold basic conversation or order a meal and that works for them, but one of my goals is to reach a native grasp of Mandarin so my situation is entirely different.

Should I bother dedicating vast amounts of time learning lots of Chengyu? How much chengyu does your average Chinese know and use in every day communication? Will memorizing tons of Chengyu improve my overall Chinese ability or is it best to simply leave it as a completely separate personal endeavor?

[Guest realmayo]

What I'm doing at the moment is treating chengyu as simply more vocab. When I come across a new chengyu I'll learn it, unless I have some reason to think it's hardly ever used. The only reason I can think of using a special dictionary to boost your chengyu knowledge is if you want to deliberately sprinkle lots of them into your writing and speech, though I have a feeling you'd need a near-native feel for the language to be sure you weren't sounding weird. If you watch Chinese TV with chinese subtitles, and read magazines and books, then you'll come across and be able to note down, look up and learn, plenty of the things, as you would with any vocab.

One thing I have now realised though is that there must have been (and still are) loads and loads of instances where I read 4 characters together and it's not obvious that it's a set-phrase or chengyu; instead I just think it is two different 2-character words side by side, whose meanings I'm not sure of. So it's not obvious just how many chengyu there are in any given page of text. But once you've learned a fair few, you start spotting the scumbags everywhere.

[xiaotao]

To have good Chinese is to know Chinese idioms. I hear idioms in movies all the time. According to a teacher from Taiwan, children start learning idioms in first grade, 4 a week and if kids can handle it 6 a week. I like the books that gives a one sentence explanation and 2 useful sentences to memorize.

[daofeishi]

To have good Chinese is to know Chinese idioms. I hear idioms in movies all the time. According to a teacher from Taiwan, children start learning idioms in first grade, 4 a week and if kids can handle it 6 a week. I like the books that gives a one sentence explanation and 2 useful sentences to memorize.

That is a bit too simplistic, I think. Whatever "having good Chinese" is, it is not merely about knowing 成语s. Knowing your idioms well is important, but most idioms are not 成语s. You hardly ever hear anyone use proper 成语s in ordinary speech, except for a very few ones such as 乱七八糟, but those you pick up really quickly anyway. Literature is a different can of beans. If you want to read Chinese prose and/or sound well-educated in your own writing, 成语s are part of the cultural background you need. What they do for you is to form a set of allusions that any educated Chinese speaker is supposed to get, and that can be used for literary effect. Knowing a 成语 is like knowing expressions like "crying wolf" or "sparing the rod" in English, and knowing what kind of feeling they evoke with the reader. To evoke the right feelings and not sound awkward, it's important that you use them correctly.

Using them correctly takes a lot of exposure, because 成语s are, both grammatically and semantically speaking, used in widely different ways depending on their composition. I don't think memorizing 成语s like children do is wise for a person learning Chinese as a second language.　Children are already competent speakers of the language, and their ears are attuned so that they can hear the difference between which modes of the language are appropriate for a given situation. Non-native speakers are still working on adjusting their ears when they are learning 成语s. If you don't take care to learn what is stylistically appropriate and what is not, your Chinese will come off as stilted and unnatural. Nothing sounds worse to my ears than an inappropriately used 成语.

I think the best way to learn 成语s for non-native speakers is through osmosis. Read Chinese prose, find out which 成语s are used and try to get a feel for them. Note what context they are used in, and gradually see if you can work them into your own writing. Be careful to check with native speakers if your usage sounds natural. Don't just memorize 成语s for their own sake. That will leave you with knowing a whole lot of phrases without being able to use them correctly. You might even end up memorizing tons of 成语s that native speakers don't generally use, and what is the use of that? It certainly won't help you writing and speaking idiomatically correct Chinese.

[xiaotao]

All the Chinese idiom books I have are for children and the sentences are simplistic and not hard to understand or memorize. If a learner can't use Chinese idioms, then maybe he or she will at least recognize them when heard on radio or TV. Everybody has their different goals.

[889]

I'd agree: don't waste your time memorizing books of chengyu; look up and study only those you actually come across in your reading.

I try to avoid chengyu and slang, however simple-minded my Chinese then sounds. Just recall all the foreigners you've met who seem to speak English exceedingly well, until they throw some slang or fixed expressions in. Nine times out of ten, the slang is inappropriately used, the fixed expressions are dated or obscure, and the result makes an otherwise very good speaker of English look a little foolish. Better you're thought simple-minded than foolish.

[gato]

I would hold off on learning chengyus until you are at a level where you can read newspapers and magazines. Before then, learning them would not be the best use of time.

Chengyus are basically advanced vocabulary. Most of them adapted from classical Chinese writing. They are analogous to the more "sophisticated" words that people learn in English, most of which are derived from French as opposed to Anglo-Saxon English (e.g. "get" vs. "obtain"). It would sound pompous and stilted (or non-native) if you use chengyu's at the wrong place or time just as it would be with the misuse of "sophisticated" words in English. A lot of Chinese memorize English vocab from the "GRE word list", but knowing how to use them will take much more than memorizing. Gaining a feel for the right usage will take a lot of time and practice.

If you are already at a level where you are reading native material, then it would be appropriate to start incorporating chengyus into your study of vocabulary. The list of 200 common chengyus prepared by Singapore Ministry of Education for their high school students that I uploaded to the forum a while ago is a good starting point. I went through them with Pleco flashcards a few times a couple of years ago, and it was kind of eerie that all these chengyu's I just learned started popping up everywhere in newspaper and magazine articles I was reading. They were there all along, of course, but I was either just inferring their meaning without knowing their dictionary meaning or skipping over them before. After learning them with Pleco, I probably was able read articles more efficiently and get more out of the reading.

[Chinadoog]

here's the list that gato mentioned

http://www.plecoforums.com/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=516

a good way to learn the most basic and important chengyu is reading some basic material like 机器猫/doraemon comics. there are a lot of chengyu and idioms in there, all of which should be pretty basic since even 8 year old Chinese kids can read those books

[renzhe]

I think the correct question is not whether you should learn chengyu, but whether you should learn chengyu right now. Eventually, you will need them, because they are everywhere, and become more common as the language becomes more formal.

I think that learning chengyu like advanced vocabulary is a good approach if your Chinese still needs much improvement in other areas. Learn them as you find them, and only learn the common ones. Only when you start noticing them everywhere -- newspapers, novels, TV shows, movies, speeches, conversation, should you make a conscious effort to learn the most common 300-500. Just memorising them before you feel the need for knowing more chengyu is probably a waste of time.

[valikor]

About to head out the door, and didn't have time to read all the posts, so I hope this is relevant/helpful.

Obviously there's many different levels of active/passive knowledge, so the best strategy depends on your goals. If you encounter a chengyu in a book which is easy enough to just guess, you could just ignore it, knowing that the next time you see it, you'll be able to guess it again (possibly even remember). You should probably look up the Chengyu that you can't guess.

It would be good to either enter the chengyu into google to estimate how commonly it is used in writing (look at the number of results), or ask a native speaker if it's one which might be used in conversation. There are certainly some chengyu which would be worth learning how to use actively in conversation, but if you literally tried to memorize every chengyu you encountered (even for passive recognition), it could be a very, very time consuming process without huge advantages.

[Guest realmayo]

if you literally tried to memorize every chengyu you encountered (even for passive recognition), it could be a very, very time consuming process without huge advantages

I agree, but isn't this true of all vocabulary?

[gato]

if you literally tried to memorize every chengyu you encountered (even for passive recognition)

Shouldn't take that long, unless you are reading a chengyu dictionary. It's going out of your way to memorize chengyus that will take too long.

[Guest realmayo]

Shouldn't take that long, unless you are reading a chengyu dictionary. It's going out of your way to memorize chengyus that will take too long.

I agree, but isn't this true of all vocabulary? :mrgreen:

Heehee. Though actually I'm probably wrong: perhaps it's the case that the more advanced your Chinese gets, the proportion of chengyu among the unknown vocab you come across every day gets much lower? That is, once a bulk of chengyu are learned, there's not many new ones to bother with, while there are still plenty of non-chengyu words needing to be learned?

[gato]

Heehee. Though actually I'm probably wrong: perhaps it's the case that the more advanced your Chinese gets, the proportion of chengyu among the unknown vocab you come across every day gets much lower? That is, once a bulk of chengyu are learned, there's not many new ones to bother with, while there are still plenty of non-chengyu words needing to be learned?

Yeah, there are about 500-600 chengyus that are commonly used in newspapers and magazines. Once you are familiar with these, it'll be fairly rare for you encounter new chengyu's in the average reading material, and even if you do see a chengyu you haven't seen before, having a base of a few hundred chengyu's would enable to infer what its approximate meaning without looking it up. Knowing some basic classical Chinese helps, too, because chengyu's are (almost by definition) derived from classical Chinese writing. There are many 4-character words that are not chengyu's but are rather 俗语. Words like 不三不四、自言自语 would fall in the 俗语 category perhaps. 俗语 are more like the spoken idioms that people know in English (phrases like "pig in a poke", "flash in a pan", etc.). Chengyus are more common in writing than speaking, which is why it's confusing to call chengyu's "idioms". Sometimes chengyu's are referred to as literary idioms to distinguish them from spoken idioms.

You can see some examples of 2-, 3-, and 4-character 俗语 here:

http://hi.baidu.com/lengbing999/blog/item/96c69a5148dbf48b8c543022.html

俗语·二字·三字·四字

[Guest realmayo]

Ah, yes, not the first time I've made the mistake of lumping 成语 and 俗语 together ... perhaps partly because of Wenlin which seems to label most of them f.e. (for "fixed expression" I think). For the purposes of the previous posts, if we were talking about all such fixed expressions (ie including your examples of 不三不四 & 自言自语), would that make any difference? For instance, do you know a greater number of 俗语 than 成语?

EDIT: actually I don't think mine is a worthwhile question. Just skimming through the list in your link, there are some 俗语 which seem to my eyes to be quite far away from being a set-phrase of any sort (eg 白吃, 巴不得, 走黑运) as well as others which do seem more set-phrasey (笨鸟先飞 etc...).

[anonymoose]

one of my goals is to reach a native grasp of Mandarin

Then learning chengyu is a must.

[valikor]

I was mainly just trying to draw attention to the fact that many chengyu may be so rarely used that they are simply not worth devoting a lot of time to, especially since the OP said he currently has not yet begun learning chengyu.

I'm sure it would be easy to find many chengyu that native speakers would not know, just like there are many English words that the majority of Americans do not know (like "anon" or "redaction", to cite some of my own recent examples).

Despite them being so rarely used, there are so many of them that you're bound to come across them frequently, and it won't be worth the time to study them... at least not until you've studied chengyu for 10 years (some of those with more years or decades of Chinese under their belt could speak to this better, I'm sure)

Probably better to first focus on mastering the "500-600" that gato mentioned. Right?

[imron]

I was mainly just trying to draw attention to the fact that many chengyu may be so rarely used that they are simply not worth devoting a lot of time to,

True, although you never know when it might come in useful

[Kongming21]

I have come across quite a few threads here that deal with Chengyu frequency lists and the question what chengyus are worth memorizing etc. I have to say that until now I have mostly only passively learned Chengyu, meaning that I have not actively learned them, but only memorized/learned them when I came across them in texts etc. The problem I encountered is that learning chengyus is very different at least to me to learning normal vocabulary. When I first encountered chengyus in my reading I would just add them to my flashcards and try to learn them as I learned normal vocab. However the result was that I would forget them very quickly and in the few cases that I would not forget them would only be able to use them passively.

However now that I really want to focus more on memorizing chengyus I wonder how everyone is actually memorizing them? Do you just learn them like any other vocab or do you use any other methods?

For a start I have started now to use the chengyu list of the Singaporean government hereand wrote these on proper flashcards(not add them into pleco) and I take some time everyday just focussing on Chengyus now.

However I still think that there is the problem that apart from the most commong ones chengyus turn up much less in texts etc and thus its hard to really get them into your long time memory. Moreover and as they can only be used in a very specific context it is also hard to use them actively and integrate them into one's pool of active vocab.

Therefore I would really like to know what everyone's strategy is when it comes to learning chengyu.

[Guest realmayo]

I also find them much more difficult than two-character words.

For chengyus more than anything else, I really think you need some context on which to hang them -- super-difficult to learn them from a list of brand new vocab.

Best context obviously is to come across a chengyu in real life, maybe in conversation a friend uses it or you spot it in the subtitles of a TV show -- you see the situation (or one of the situations) where it's used, where it's appropriate, and then while you learn and later review it, you can remind yourself of the context you saw it in first. In this way it becomes a "real" piece of language that you can relate to, which is especially important for chengyus which can otherwise seem quite abstract.

Obviously, another way to create a context is where the chengyu has some kind of back-story or fable behind it. I've found it useful to read the explanations of these in Chinese as a translation exercise, which then helps me remember the chengyu better later on.

I have to admit a few months ago I did get a list of what I thought were the most common 50 or so and learned them that way and it actually worked because they were common and I was seeeing them all the time when I was reading; they're a bit like names in Chinese: if you haven't learned the chengyu, then when you see it in a book you don't know it's a chengyu, because it looks like one two-character word followed by another two-character word. But once you know what it is, you'll start seeing it everywhere. This though I assume only applies to the most common ones.