Combining characters into idioms, and then idioms into characters
Digging out my 20-year-old Chinese phrase book
Well, even I couldn’t believe my elementary school practice book survived for almost 20 years! My affectionate mother said she was reluctant to throw this commemorative notebook away, so here it is:
Here’s how we learn new characters and phrases at school: for each new lesson in our Chinese textbook, students write down newly learned characters in the phrase book and look up in a dictionary for phrases (vocabulary or idioms) containing the characters.
Back then I was a perfectionist child and would spend hours going through different dictionaries to find as many idioms as possible for each character in my phrase book. The reason is simple: idioms are more ‘classy’ than that relatively plain 2-character vocabulary.
Using Chinese idioms is a fancy way of expression. Idioms mainly appear in prose, but some colloquial idioms do pop up in daily conversations. Using idioms during conversations does not just make people look smart;
Moreover, idioms convey subtle emotions or metaphors in a simple yet powerful way, which is quite useful in certain contexts.
To give you a few examples, I randomly thought of two idioms we use in daily conversations (by the way, we don’t use pinyin in Taiwan, so I’ll let Google pronounce the idioms for you in the links):
The following example sentences are related to a recent recall vote of a mayor in Taiwan. You can read the stories here:https://medium.com/taiwanlady/making-history-in-taiwan-recalling-a-mayor-of-special-municipality-849ad6520de3https://medium.com/taiwanlady/first-officially-fired-mayor-in-taiwan-9d85528f1e2c
- 不自量力
As I said in a previous article, each Chinese character has a meaning itself, and a typical idiom consists of 4 characters. In this idiom, the meaning of each character is:
不 / 自 / 量 / 力 = unable or not / oneself / estimate or evaluate / power or ability
So, when you describe someone as 不自量力, it means that you think this person is “doing or planning to do something that’s beyond his power or ability”.
For example, when my colleagues and I discuss about this recently recalled Taiwanese mayor, we would shake our heads and say ‘Han is so 不自量力 to run for the president.’
Using idioms is a neat way to express our thoughts — in only 4 syllables! - 樂極生悲
Here is the second example:
樂 / 極 / 生 / 悲 = happiness / extreme / grow / sadness
This one is pretty straightforward: ‘Extreme happiness often comes with great misfortune.’
Let’s continue with the example above: Mr. Han won the mayoral election as a dark horse in 2018, but was soon removed from the city hall this year. We can summarize his situation as 樂極生悲.
Seems easy so far right?
However, idioms we learn at school are usually more euphemistic. Many Chinese idioms have historic stories behind them, and in some cases, you could never guess the idioms’ meaning without knowing the background stories. These idioms are usually too fancy (sometimes even hypocritical!) for daily conversations, but we do use them quite often in formal writing.
Here are two examples (these are also elementary-school-level idioms):
- 沉魚落雁
沉 / 魚 / 落 / 雁 = sinking / fish / falling / wild goose
This is a fun one. This idiom originates from a famous beauty named 西施 in ancient China (around 500 BC). Legend has it that she was so glamorous that when fish saw her, they stopped swimming to admire her beauty and therefore sank in the river; wild geese stared at her and forgot to move their wings and thus dropped from the sky.
Exaggerating, yes, but quite hilarious! - 兔死狗烹
兔 / 死 / 狗 / 烹 = rabbit / died / dog / cooked
You might be able to catch the meaning although it’s not very instinctive. This story is related to another historical figure named 文種. He was an advisor of a king named 句踐 in ancient China (also around 500 BC). 文種 was loyal to the king, but early on 文種’s friend warned him that the king was not generous enough to share his power and fortune once the kingdom unified. 文種 did not listen to his friend’s advice and stayed beside the king after they won the war. 文種 was eventually sentenced to death by the king.
The advice 文種’s friend gave him was the metaphor “狡兔死，走狗烹”, meaning that “after a hunter tracks down the most cunning rabbit with a hunting dog’s help, he will then kill and eat the dog instead.”
You can see how this whole story can be condensed into just 6 characters in Chinese — and then into a 4-character idiom.
Both stories are classics; every student learns these stories at school. There are more stories I would love to share in the future, but let’s not go that far in this article.
Sometimes people would ask, how do we read a Chinese sentence? There’s no space between phrases and conjunction words, so how do we separate the phrases within?
A Chinese sentence may look like this:
韓市長最近被罷免，大家的心情暢快淋漓。
The way we read this sentence looks like this:
韓 / 市長 / 最近 / 被 / 罷免，大家 / 的 / 心情 / 暢快淋漓。
Translate: Han / mayor / recently / (passive voice) / recall / , / everyone / ‘s / mood / cheerful (another 4-character idiom).
As we are able to quickly recognize and separate the phrases in a sentence, space is not necessary in Chinese. I think there used to be no space in English writing as well (a very long time ago I guess?), but English is a phonetic language and thus more difficult to understand without spaces; however, almost every Chinese character holds a meaning itself, so it’s easy to catch the meaning of a written Chinese sentence fast.
Back to the idioms. Here’s a fun fact I’d like to share with you: not only do we combine characters to form phrases — we also do the reverse!
Some idioms — usually 4-character with auspicious meaning —can be combined into a single complex character. The most popular one is probably ‘招財進寶’ (in red background). This idiom simply means ‘bringing in wealth and treasure’. You might have seen this character before; it is often written on a spring couplet:
If you look at this character carefully, you would recognize the four characters: 招 in the right lower corner with 財 sticking to its left, 進 in the left lower corner, and 寶 in the center.
Just so you know, these ‘combined characters’ are not formal characters — they cannot be pronounced, and the only time we would see them is during Chinese New Year.
As a matter of fact, you can invent your own combined character!
You may also notice that among these combined characters, a part of them is shared. This brings us to our next topic: radicals.
In the next post, I’d like to introduce the first Chinese dictionary: 《說文解字》 (“Explaining Graphs and Analyzing Characters”). Radicals were initially created as the index of this dictionary. I will also show you how radicals are combined into characters — this is also a fascinating characteristic of Chinese characters.
See you then!
Hi readers, I hope you find this article interesting!
I post weekly articles about my country Taiwan and Chinese Mandarin. Follow me on Medium for more related articles. You can also follow me on Twitter.
