Chinese idioms (chengyu): the most common ones and the stories behind them (video)
The 100 most common Chinese idioms (chengyu), counted in 160 million characters of film, TV and news, plus the stories behind the famous ones.
Chapters
- 0:00Start
- 0:20The short answer
- 0:36What is a chengyu?
- 1:18The 10 most common chengyu
- 2:24Famous idioms are rarely used
- 2:56Spoken or written?
- 3:24How many do you need?
- 3:56The stories behind the famous ones
- 5:37Learn them in phrases
- 6:07Try it out loud
Transcript
Start
Most guides to Chinese idioms teach 画蛇添足: draw a snake, add feet. But in 16 million lines of Chinese film and TV subtitles, we found it three times. From SayMei Guides, by Mei Lin: Chinese idioms. The most common ones, and the stories behind them.
The short answer
The short answer: the most common idioms are everyday phrases, not famous fables. We counted about 5,000 idioms in film and TV subtitles and in news. The famous story idioms? They rank in the hundreds, or even the thousands.
What is a chengyu?
What is a 成语, exactly? It's a set phrase, almost always four characters long. Many come from classical Chinese, so they pack a lot into very little. Take 守株待兔. Word for word, it's 'guard stump, wait rabbit'. It means waiting for luck instead of working, and it points to a story more than two thousand years old. How many are there? Nobody agrees. An open Chinese-English dictionary labels about 5,000 as idioms. Big Chinese idiom dictionaries list 30,000 or more. We checked those 5,000 against 160 million characters of real Chinese. About one in five never showed up once.
The 10 most common chengyu
So which idioms do people actually use? We counted every idiom in 29,000 film and TV subtitle files, for speech, and a million news sentences, for writing. Here are the ten that came out on top. Number one: 无论如何, no matter what. Two: 不可思议, unbelievable. Three: 难以置信, hard to believe. Four: 与众不同, out of the ordinary. Five: 前所未有, unprecedented. Six: 不可避免, inevitable. Seven: 一模一样, exactly alike. Eight: 成千上万, thousands upon thousands. Nine: 独一无二, one of a kind. And ten: 无能为力, powerless to help. Notice what's missing: animals, emperors and morals. You could guess most of these from their characters. Take 独一无二. Word for word, it's 'only one, no two'. That's good news: the idioms you need first are the easiest to learn.
Famous idioms are rarely used
The idioms most guides teach first are some of the rarest. We read the ten top search results for Chinese idioms, and noted every idiom they list. 'Draw a snake, add feet' is on eight of the ten lists. In our count, it's number 2,473. 井底之蛙, a frog in a well, is on five lists, and it's number 1,395. None of the idioms that three or more guides list makes our top 100. Why the gap? A story is just more fun to teach than 'hard to believe'.
Spoken or written?
Speech and print prefer different idioms. Only a quarter of the 100 most common idioms in our subtitles also make the news top 100. You'll hear 谢天谢地, thank goodness, all the time in films. In the news, it barely exists. 众所周知, as everyone knows, runs the other way. So match the idiom to the setting: spoken ones for talking, newsy ones for essays and exam answers.
How many do you need?
How many do you need? Fewer than you'd fear. The top 25 cover eleven and a half percent of all the idioms you'll meet. The top 100 cover about a quarter, and the top 500, more than half. The HSK agrees that idioms are advanced: 59 of our top 100 are HSK 7 to 9 words, and 35 aren't on the list at all. A sensible plan: learn the top 25 around HSK 4 or 5, then work through the top 100 as you read more.
The stories behind the famous ones
The famous ones still matter, though. They're short, memorable, and old: ten of the 18 that SayMei retells go back to before China was unified, in 221 BC. Many began as arguments: a philosopher or an adviser told a quick, funny story to win a point, often in front of a king. 守株待兔, wait by the stump for a rabbit. A farmer sees a rabbit break its neck on a tree stump. He drops his plough and waits for another. None comes. 画蛇添足, draw a snake, add feet. Servants race to draw a snake for a cup of wine. The fastest adds feet, and loses, because snakes have none. 井底之蛙, a frog in a well. A frog boasts about its little well to a turtle from the sea, until the turtle describes the ocean. 塞翁失马, the old man loses his horse. The lost horse comes back with another. His son breaks a leg riding it, and the broken leg keeps him out of a deadly war. Luck keeps flipping. 对牛弹琴, play the lute to a cow. A musician plays refined music to an ox, which keeps on grazing. And 自相矛盾, spear and shield. A seller swears his spear pierces anything, and his shield stops everything. Someone asks what happens if the spear hits the shield. That's why 矛盾, 'spear-shield', now means contradiction. SayMei Stories retells all 18 in three short books, at about HSK 1.
Learn them in phrases
Idioms stick best when you learn them the way people use them. Start with the top 25, five a week. Learn each one with a partner phrase, like 便宜得难以置信, unbelievably cheap. Say them out loud, in a sentence about your own day. Notice them in shows. And read the stories for the famous ones. One caveat: don't force literary idioms into small talk. Learners on forums warn they can sound stiff. The everyday ones at the top of our list are safe.
Try it out loud
Ready to try an idiom in a real conversation? You can talk with Mei Lin for free: your first lesson is up to 10 minutes, with no account, card or download. The full top 100, and all 129 idioms we cover, are on the page at saymei dot app.