Benefits of Learning Chinese Idioms

Idioms are widespread in both spoken and written Chinese. Having children  understand even just a few of the more popular idioms will allow them to read the news, stories, and text with greater facility. It is difficult to want to read something you don’t comprehend – so at the very least, this eases the obstacles to reading higher level books or those geared towards the native speaker.

Most idioms condense a full story into 4 characters. Thus, teaching our children what they mean will also increase their comprehension of the actual characters in the idiom, what the Chinese in the expanded original sources mean, and how the idioms fit in context of conversation.

Understanding idioms requires children to expand their thinking from the literal to the figurative. As we tell the idioms’ original stories, they will see and absorb how language can be metaphorical and symbolic. They will passively learn how simple words can encapsulate huge, complex ideas.

For example, take the idiom 井底之蛙 (a frog in a well) and its related idiom, 坐井觀天 (looking at the sky while sitting at the bottom of the well).

The story behind the idiom is that a frog lived at the bottom of a well all its life. One day, a turtle comes by and tells the frog about the sea and the sky. The frog scoffs to the turtle saying that there is nothing bigger or better than the well and that the sky is just a tiny round circle.

The idiom conveys the narrow-mindedness of people who have never ventured beyond their small spheres and think the well is an ocean or that the vast expanse of the sky is just a tiny circle. It is an illustration of people who have no idea about anything outside their world.