WHAT’S A CHENG YU?

Have you ever wondered why, while doing a translation, reading a newspaper, watching a Chinese advertisement or even talking to a native speaker, there are some words that just don’t make sense together, making you wonder if you have really been studying Chinese all these years? Well don’t worry, it happened at least once to all of us, you have just done your first encounter with a CHENG YU (in chinese 成语).

Starting from the analysis of the two characters that make up the word, we have 成cheng that means “complete, fully developed” and 语 yu that can be translated as “language, proverb, saying”, so a cheng yu would be a “set phrase”.

To give a proper definition, a Cheng Yu is an idiomatic phrase mostly composed of four or six characters. Its origin goes back to historical or legendary episodes that can be found in texts from many centuries ago. That’s for this reason that the meaning of a Cheng Yu goes beyond the sum of the meaning of each character that composes it, and that’s also why it is so difficult to translate it if you don’t know the story that’s behind it. They do not follow chinese modern grammar’s rule, but classic chinese ones.

Cheng Yu are a funny and challenging way to learn chinese culture and ancient history; mastering them shows not only your language abilities but also your intellect. Today in China Cheng Yu are studied from a very young age because Chinese take great pride in their past and see in Cheng Yu he reflection of it.

At this point you may wonder, how many Cheng Yu are out there? Well there are about 5000 of them, but some dictionaries list 20.000, but don’t worry, you don’t need to learn all of them, the most common 300 is more than enough.

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Let's see an example of Cheng Yu

The Cheng yu we will study is: 画蛇添足 (PY: huà shé tiān zú). This idiom is commonly used in everyday life, and its literal meaning is "adding legs to a snake", or in other words,"ruining a thing by adding something unnecessary".

This Cheng yu's story comes from Strategy II of the Qi State in Strategies of the Warring States.

Once there was a nobleman in the state of Chu that, after making offerings to his ancestors, took a bowl of wine that was left over and decided to give it to his servants.

Since the wine was not enough for everyone, they agreed that it would be much better if it went to one person. To decide who could drink the wine they made a competition: they had to draw a snake on the ground. The one who finished drawing first would have drank the bowl of wine.

One of them finished his drawing quickly, took the pot of wine and was about to drink. He looked at the others, who had still not finished yet and thought that he still had enough time to add feet to his snake. But before he finished the feet, another man completed his own snake and grabbed the bowl from him, saying, "Whoever has seen a snake with feet? Yours is not a snake. So, the wine should be mine!" and he drank the wine.

Now people use this idiom to illustrate that going too far is as bad as not going far enough.

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Chinese Text:

很久以前，有一个贵族。他打算 送给朋友们一小壶酒，可是，人多酒少，不好均分。谁先喝，是个难题。有一个人建议说：「我们在地上画蛇把，谁先画完，谁就喝。」 大家都表示同意，他们就在地上开始画起蛇来。都想画得叉快叉好，争取先喝这壶酒。没多久，有一个人已将蛇画完，他抢过酒壶，很高兴，心里想：「这壶酒我可一口气喝完。」他看看别人还在画，他就很得意，随口说：「我还要为我画的这条蛇画上脚。我相信面完脚，他们也还没面完。」他的蛇脚还没画完，有一个人抢过酒壶，说：「我画完了！」那位画蛇脚的人说：「我先画完的，因为我补画脚，你才赶上来。」夺过酒壶的人说： 「蛇 本来没有脚，谁叫你 画蛇添足？」然后一口就把酒喝光了。 如今，如果有人做了 本来不必做的事，結果不但没有好处，反而有坏处，我们就会说他

「画蛇添足」。