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Chinese Idioms and language quirks

chriscoboy1   January 14th, 2011 3:13p.m.

Hey I was wondering if there is a list of Chinese phrases that are kinda unique to the language.
ie. in America we say jump the gun or horsing around.

Thomas   January 14th, 2011 9:41p.m.

Some lists have been tagged 'idiom', so I suggest checking those out first.

http://www.skritter.com/vocab/tags?tag=chengyu

I'll be uploading a list of colloquial idioms from the book I just got "A Course in Chinese Colloquial Idioms" or 《汉语口语习惯用语教程》in the next month or two. It'd be a lot of work to input these 400+ idioms and I'd probably be doing it with Chinese definitions.

Anyone else have this book and looking to collaborate on making the list?

Roland   January 14th, 2011 11:31p.m.

Thomas, I was thinking exactly about the same, however, I was hesitating because of 2 reasons: the amount of work, as what you mentioned, and I think, we cannot add in the example sentences. For me, it makes less sense, if there are no example sentences / context during learning. What do you think about this?
Roland

FatDragon   January 15th, 2011 3:21a.m.

Personally, I get a lot of the context in actual conversations or listening to people speak. I study a new word here, and then I start hearing it out in the real world and learn how to use it. To be sure, that only works for relatively common language, and only for people who have a decent level of immersion, but it's worked pretty well for me...

Thomas   January 15th, 2011 7:01a.m.

Because many of the idioms in my new book of 'colloquial idioms' are already defined in Skritter, progress will be faster than I thought. I might have it posted as soon as tomorrow. If you need the context for it, I highly recommend buying the book for 31RMB.

On context, maybe because of my high exposure, I'm with FatDragon here. It seems I learn a word and usually see or hear it within a week. On top of that, I think taking sets of vocabulary from books is okay but taking the example sentences and context and sharing that is going too far, is unfair to the publishers and authors, and is copyright infringement.

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