Learning Chinese Idioms

[Sydney Matt]

As I've learnt from one of my teachers (and I completely agree with her) 成语 are not only interesting, they can also express things concisely, and therefore are very useful. For instance, 爱莫能助 is a lovely concise way of saying "我很想帮助你，但是我没有能力", is it not? The other 语s are important too of course!

As to the OP, given the amount of other resources out there that already offer something similar, I'm not sure I would pay for a service (website/app etc.) like that. Certainly not saying it's a bad idea, just feel it would need to be unique in some aspect if it were to cut through.

[tooironic]

Would a native speaker of Mandarin really use 愛莫能助 in reply to a request though?

Since chengyu are rarely used in conversation, deliberately making an effort to sneak them into conversation can sound fake, or even pretentious. They don't necessarily make you seem more fluent than you are; on the contrary, they can make you sound even more foreign. Like those Chinese students of English you meet from time to time who are determined to answer everything you ask them in idioms. (How's the weather today? - It is raining cats and dogs!)

[li3wei1]

A quick look at 锵锵三人行 :

In

许子东：中国保钓之战有八大军事优势

the chengyu 在所难免 appears a few paragraphs in, in

许子东：习近平评日本行为 话中有深意

归根结底 is a few paragraphs in. So, not 'frequent', but I wouldn't call them 'rare', either. Maybe about as frequent as some grammatical structure typically learned in second year.

Or would you say that the people on that show are pretentious?

Also, learning them is not the same as sticking them into every sentence. To learn how to use them appropriately, you have to first learn them. If the Chinese student of English in the above example asked what the weather was like, and someone said 'it's raining cats and dogs', and he hadn't learned that idiom, he'd be lost.

[skylee]

Prof Xu teaches Chinese IIRC.

I can't watch the videos now. But really I can't recall knowing any natives unable to use some chengyus. But then everyone is entitiled to their own views and beliefs.

[ouyangjun]

My take on 成语. They are a useful and important part of the Chinese language. I don't think that can really be questioned. I do not think that foreingers/learners of Chinese langauge should focus a lot of time on 成语. I think that learners of Chinese language should spend the time broadening their vocabulary rather than studying 成语. Once you are to the point of fluent... and I mean really fluent (conversationally, work wise, reading), then 成语 can be an area to study. But I think the time and effort spent to learn 成语 is better spent learning new vocabulary. More often than not, you will not be able to follow a conversation, miss a joke, resort to a dictionary due to not knowing vocab instead of not knowing 成语.

To this day I still don't put too much emphasis on 成语, the common ones I've come across randomly enough to remember, other than that, not much focus.

[tooironic]

Skylee, I believe the fact that most native speakers can use some chengyus is because they are drilled into their heads throughout their education. Whether they go out of their way to use them in conversation is still highly debateable.

That intellectuals, professors and other public figures use flowery language in program like 锵锵三人行 is hardly a surprise either. It would be interesting to see if a foreigner could pull off imitating their style in a way that didn't come across as ostentatious or alienating. I'm not saying it's impossible, and I'm all for people choosing to study whatever they wish, but it's hardly a realistic goal or piece of advice for the average learner.

If the Chinese student of English in the above example asked what the weather was like, and someone said 'it's raining cats and dogs', and he hadn't learned that idiom, he'd be lost.

Perhaps I didn't make my point very clearly. What I was hinting at was that it's highly unlikely a native speaker would use an idiom like that in conversation. It is more likely they'd use slang or another type of colloquial expression instead (e.g. it's raining buckets, it's pouring/pissing down, it's crazy out there, etc.). That really goes back to my original argument that 成语 are no more important than 俗语, 俚语 and other types of parts of speech. In some ways they're even less important.

[gato]

That really goes back to my original argument that 成语 are no more important than 俗语, 俚语 and other types of parts of speech. In some ways they're even less important.

Chengyu's are more important for writing, not as important for speaking.

[li3wei1]

the fact that most native speakers can use some chengyus is because they are drilled into their heads throughout their education

This alone makes them worth studying. If your goal is to be able to communicate effectively with native speakers, surely having access to a collection of stories that they are all familiar with, any one of which can be summoned up with four characters, or sometimes even two, is useful? In the same way that for someone studying English, an understanding of the most commonly repeated stories from Shakespeare and the Bible (not the original texts), plus the stories from history as taught (Henry VIII and his wives, George Washington and the cherry tree). Not essential, certainly not if you limit your language use to conversations with people who are not 'intellectuals', but if you want to understand the cultural aspects of the language I think chengyu stories are about as efficient a resource as there is. 俗语, 俚语 etc. would probably be equally as good, but I haven't seen learning resources for these. Perhaps this would be an area for the OP to investigate?

As for what types of 熟语appear most frequently in conversation, that's a question for someone with an appropriate corpus and some pretty sophisticated filtering software.

[ouyangjun]

I agree with tooironic about other parts of speech such as slang being much more effective than chengyu (spoken perspective). And I agree with Gato that chengyu is more important from a writing/reading perspective.

My take is that from a reading writing perspective, when I run across four characters in a row that make no sense to me, it is usually a chengyu, so I will use a dictionary to reference. In real life this luxury does not exist. This is why I think chengyu are not too important to study. In real day to day life (if living in China) an extensive vocabulary (including slang and fashionable words) is more useful than chengyu. Other than the really common 成语 rarely do I hear 成语 in normal conversation.

The top 5 most useful (commonly heard) chengyu that I use/hear/read:

乱七八糟

胡说八道

滔滔不绝

莫名其妙

一路平安

The first two I use in my regular vocabulary, 莫名其妙 also makes an occasional appearance.

More important than 成语 to me are the slang, because these I hear on a regular basis, and if incorporated correctly into conversations with friends, it is much more "natural" in my opinion versus 成语.

吊死, 给力，牛， anything b， 高帅富， 坑爹， 吃货， 饭桶， 富二代，海龟，黄（例如：黄色电影），hold住, so many....

[Lu]

li3wei3: I'm sure you're right. In the past if I was reading and came across a four-character expression I tended to skim past it on the basis that it would probably be rare and less important than "normal" vocab. When I finally forced myself to sit down and go through a list of the most common 200 or so I found lots that I'd never learned. Having learned them, I came across them all the time.

Plus because Chinese has no word boundaries there's often nothing to tell you that a four-character phrase isn't two words of two characters each, neither of which you know. So sometimes if reading quickly you don't realise that you've just read a chengyu that you don't understand, you think it's just two words you don't understand.

I agree. I too used to see chengyu as less important than vocabulary and am now sitting down to learn more of them. New learners don't need them right away (and someone who took a class in chengyu and then throws them around all the time is a bit annoying), but at some point they need to be learned because otherwise you'll just always miss stuff.

As to the word boundaries, when I come across four characters in a row I don't quite get, I always try searching them as a chengyu or other -yu first, very often they turn out to be a set expression.

OP: I would perhaps pay if it was in Dutch and really good, with a bunch extra features. Currently I'm just building my own learn-the-chengyu deck on Anki.