Chinese has an extremely high frequency of use when it comes to four-character idioms and common sayings.
There are several thousand commonly used ones.
But most Chinese people probably only master a few hundred.
They usually come from historical allusions or fables.
I know more than most because when I was a child, China was very poor, and getting hold of a book was no easy task.
I was lucky enough to have a copy of A Dictionary of Chinese Idioms. I read it so many times, as if it were a novel, that it literally fell apart.
(The other book I read like a novel, and one that really helped pass the time, was a dictionary.)
Other languages naturally have similar expressions. For example, in English, some of the ones I’m more familiar with include “Cross the Rubicon,” “Sisyphean task,” “The die is cast,” “A Pyrrhic victory,” and “Et tu, Brute?”
But perhaps when it comes to sheer quantity, Chinese just has too many.
I used to say that Chinese is easy to learn—until you reach the advanced stage.
Then you run into trouble…
You have to learn the history and the culture along with it.
That said, the same is true for other languages.
Learning a language means learning everything embedded in it—it’s just that Chinese makes this particularly obvious.
It’s certainly not easy. In my opinion, the best way to learn is to buy a dictionary of idioms and read it like a novel—with great interest.
Believe me, it’s not hard at all, because behind every idiom is an interesting little story.
The frequent use of idioms greatly reduces the cost of communication among Chinese people. Many concepts that would otherwise take hundreds or even thousands of words to convey can be transmitted in just four characters.
Take 养寇自重—just saying that immediately gets the idea across.
It’s a bit like computing: I supply the implicit parameters (current context) plus the function name (the idiom), and the other person receives the parameters, calls the function, and gets the result.
Very efficient.
But yes, it’s also a bit difficult.
Here’s an example I really like: Back when Sino-Soviet relations were strained, during a negotiation, the Chinese representative angrily rebuked the Soviet side.
The Soviet representative, quite flustered, tried to explain: “We have not occupied your Gansu Province, nor do we have any territorial claims on Sichuan Province.”
In fact, the Chinese representative had used the idiom 得陇望蜀 (to covet Sichuan after seizing Gansu).
This phrase originates from a historical event in 32 AD, when Emperor Guangwu had already captured the area of Gansu and was planning to attack Sichuan.
He joked himself about human greed—how people are never satisfied: having taken Gansu, I still wanted Sichuan.
Later, the phrase became a derogatory term for insatiable greed.
But the Soviet translator took the idiom literally…
(I checked a used-book site recently. The cheapest copy of that idiom dictionary I read countless times as a child is just 1.2 yuan—roughly 0.17 US dollars. Back then, though, it cost my father a full day’s wages, which in today’s money would be around 30 dollars. Pretty expensive, really.)