四字词 (four character proverbs) list

[大肚男]

Hello everyone,

I've been visiting this website for about a week and I thought it was great, so I registered.

I've been studying mandarin for about 14 months.

Recently, I have been watching Chinese movies and TV show with my girlfriend.

With my limited comprehension of spoken Chinese, I have been mostly relying on the Chinese subtitles.

However, every few lines I read a sentence that makes no sense or that is grammatically odd, when I ask my girlfriend, she tells me that it is a four character proverb (四字词).

Apparently, there is about 3 millions of these in mandarin

I was wondering if any one has a list of the most common ones, or if anyone is interested in compiling such a list.

I will try my best to keep track of such proverbs whenever I hear one, and list them here if there is interest.

examples of this are 不醉不归，which means "we will get drunk", or 不见不散 which means "let's not leave until we meet"

[skylee]

This is like one of the FAQs and there are many such (or similar) threads here. I suppose you can try searching the keyword 成語 / chengyu on this website. These two websites might also be useful (the MOE Dictionary of Chinese Idioms is very useful if you can read it) ->

http://www.chinese-t...ry/english.html

http://140.111.34.36...e=1315741254421

[大肚男]

Thank you, I didn't know that they're called 成语.

And wow, there are so many of them, just looking at them makes my brain hurt

[YuehanHao]

From the perspective of a student with a track record longer than 14 mos., the example idioms given in this case apparently can be inferred from knowing the characters' meanings. This is the best case, since others (many originating from classical times) may be inscrutable even when the individual components are known.

The examples remind me of the notice I first saw posted on convenience stores' doors in the southern U.S. as a young child:

NO SHIRT

NO SHOES

NO SERVICE

Although obvious now, the intent of this shorthanded phrasing was not immediately apparent to that youngster.

In the same mold, then, perhaps we can think of these examples as representing something like:

Not drunk, not leave

Not meet, not leave

约翰好

[大肚男]

YueHanHao, yeah, these two examples I posted maybe easy to guess at, but they were the only two that I could remember off hand (probably because they're easy)

But some have a more vague nuance, which makes it harder to remember and use properly.

I'm using the links that Skylee posted and I will ask my gf to take a look at them and tell me which ones are most common. Maybe I'll make flash cards using gFlash+ to memorize it.

[paperbagprince23]

成语 are a little hard to remember at first. That is because so many of Chengyu use the classic usage of words. After a while, they get really easy though, only have to read it one time to remember it. It also helps to read a lot of classical Chinese (not that you can after 14 months, but you sound on the right track!) since so so many chengyu come straight from passages in classical Chinese.

Actually, all my friends joke that I use too many chengyu. I really can't write an essay now without having a chengyu in like every over sentence.