Chengyu, a magic key to Chinese language and culture, or a waste of time?

Ever since I started learning Chinese, I’ve heard people say that if I want to reach an advanced level, I should focus on 成语/成語 (chéngyǔ). They allegedly summarise the wisdom of the Chinese civilisation and carry the soul of its culture.

However, the role of chengyu in Chinese language education for foreigners has always irked me. For most students, these idioms are nowhere near as important to learn as they are made out to be, and the way chengyu is taught is deeply flawed.

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In this article, I will share my own experience of learning and teaching chengyu. Are they a magic key to Chinese language and culture, or a waste of time?

Chengyu and other idiomatic expressions in Chinese

Chengyu are typically four-character idioms derived from classical literature. These fixed expressions often carry significance beyond the sum of the characters they are made of, so their meaning can be opaque, even if you have a good understanding of Chinese characters and know enough about literary Chinese to decode their internal structure.

To fully understand the idiom, you need to know its derivation. For example, the commonly used chengyu 自相矛盾 (zìxiāngmáodùn) means “paradoxical” or “self-contradiction”, but this is not apparent from the characters themselves, which means “self”, “mutual”, “spear” and “shield”.

The meaning “paradoxical” only makes sense if you know that the story behind this chengyu is that of a merchant selling spears and shields, claiming that his spears can pierce anything and his shields can withstand any attack. A clever bystander then asks what happens if you use one of his spears to try to pierce one of his shields.

Chengyu is only one type of Chinese idiom out of many. If you want to learn more about other types of idiomatic expressions, you can look up 俗语 (súyǔ), 歇后语 (xiēhòuyǔ) and谚语 (yànyǔ), but I rarely hear them touted as keys to all wonders, and students seem less obsessed about them, which is why I will focus on chengyu here.

My experience: Using chengyu to reach an advanced level

Let’s look at myself, a fairly typical example. As mentioned in the introduction, I heard that chengyu was the pinnacle of the Chinese language and encapsulated the wisdom of the ancients. I learnt numerous stories about them, such as the one about 自相矛盾 (zìxiāngmáodùn) related above. When I tried to use the chengyu with native speakers, they were overjoyed that a foreigner spoke such advanced Chinese.

The rumour was true; chengyu truly is the key to Chinese language and culture!

All this was wrong and nobody thought my Chinese was advanced

Then, after having learnt Chinese for many years, I realised that this was all an illusion. Most of the chengyu I learnt turned out to have limited usage (more about this later). When native speakers said it was cool that I used chengyu, it was in a “Oh, look, the foreigner is trying to use chengyu, how cute!” kind of way. Most of my attempts were also incorrect, but most people are too polite to say so.

To mention a concrete example, the textbook I used as a beginner in Sweden (汉语口语速成) had the chengyu 十全十美 (shíquánshíměi) in it, with the translation of “perfect”. I then proceeded to use this idiom incorrectly a few dozen times before I figured out that it’s mostly used in the negative, and if it is used in the positive, the standard is pretty high. It’s not something you say as a response to a question about going out for a beer.

Rethinking my approach to chengyu

I have now had more than a decade to think about the role of chengyu in Chinese language education for adult second language learners. In essence, I have three things to say:

1. Chengyu is more limited than you think
   
2. Always learn chengyu with a sentence
   
3. You don’t actually need chengyu

1. Chengyu is more limited than you think

The first thing you should know about chengyu is that they typically express specific concepts. The usage is often much narrower than any English definitions you see in connection with the idiom. This isn’t true for all chengyu, some even have closely corresponding expressions in English (here are some examples), but it is true in most cases.

Let me tell you about a game I used to play when writing articles. I had a good passive grasp of chengyu, so when I wrote articles, I often knew that there probably was a chengyu that would fit in a particular sentence.

The game was like a boxing match: me vs. chengyu  When I used an idiom correctly, I scored one point, and when I used an idiom incorrectly or awkwardly, my opponent scored one point.

I almost always lost, even after having studied Chinese for many years and focusing a lot on writing. Using chengyu correctly is hard. This is true for other words in Chinese as well, but it’s particularly tricky with these idioms.

Chengyu are harder to learn than most vocabulary

If we take normal words and experiment by expanding their use to areas in which we haven’t encountered them before, we will sometimes find that they work in this new context, and sometimes we’ll find that they don’t. Through a mix of negative and positive feedback, we slowly build an accurate mental model of how the words are used.

Making mistakes in Chinese is necessary to adjust your mental models

When you experiment with normal words, you’ll be right a fair number of times, but with chengyu, you will almost always be wrong.

Here is a rough representation of what’s going on. The red circles represent correct usage and the white circles represent how learners tend to think about it. If the circles overlap completely, the word or phrase has been mastered.

As we can see, learning words is about adjusting the circles so they match (the size should vary too, but that would make the drawing messy). For chengyu, though, the most significant difference between the circles is the size. Chengyu usually has a much narrower usage than learners think.

Figuring out how a chengyu is used, gradually without noticing it

Let’s look at an example. I don’t remember where I learnt 不知不觉 (bùzhībùjué), but it’s a very common chengyu. Most dictionaries define it as “unconsciously”, “unwittingly” or “without noticing”. With this mental model in your mind, you can spend years and never understand why it’s underlined in red whenever you use it in writing, and why people frown when you use it in conversations.

Until you realise that the usage is much more limited than you thought. 不知不觉 (bùzhībùjué) is typically only used to refer to the passing of time, that something happens or becomes true as time goes by, without you noticing. Once you know this, it becomes obvious, as almost all examples you encounter match this new model.

Acquiring that model takes an awful lot of input, though, or someone needs to point it out to you. This requires good and honest feedback, which is not easy to get.

How to get honest feedback to boost your Chinese speaking and writing

This brings me to the second point:

2. Always learn chengyu with a sentence

The biggest mistake students (including my past self) make is that they treat chengyu as normal words, which isn’t a good approach. Instead, learn each chengyu in a specific context. I don’t mean that you should just add an example sentence to your flashcard program, I mean that you should learn the example sentence and the chengyu as one unit.

Ideally, the sentence should show the way the chengyu is typically used. If you choose a random sentence you find online, it’s unlikely to fulfil this requirement.

Some chengyu are only used to describe one specific thing, so if you know that one sentence, you’ve covered most of the uses of that chengyu!

In other words, you should start from a tiny small circle and then slowly expand that as you find other examples of how that chengyu is used, rather than drawing a big circle and gradually shrinking it. This will mean that you use chengyu less, but you will also avoid using them incorrectly.

3. You don’t actually need chengyu

Chengyu are cool. I like the stories and the cultural and historical insights I gain through the stories. However, saying that you have to be able to use lots of chengyu to get good at Chinese is simply wrong.

Do you have to understand chengyu? At a somewhat advanced level, definitely.

Do you have to be able to use chengyu? Not really. It’s perfectly possible to speak Chinese extremely well without using many chengyu.

Chengyu are cool, but that’s not enough

Your normal vocabulary, grammar and pronunciation matter much more than if you throw in a chengyu here and there. And remember, if you throw one in the wrong idiom or use one incorrectly, you’ll show that you don’t know that much, and it certainly doesn’t make communication easier.

As a beginner, it’s cool to be the cute foreigner doing his best, but that’s not so cool when you’re trying to grow up in Chinese and become an adult student.

Naturally, if you’re Chinese is so good that it starts approaching an educated native speaker, you can ignore what I just said. You also can’t escape some common chengyu even at a lower level.

That’s not what I’m talking about here, I’m talking about the thousands of chengyu that pop up in books, blog posts and YouTube videos. Understand them, study them if you like, but do so because you’re interested and like it, not in a vain attempt to make your Chinese more advanced, because you will most likely shoot yourself in the foot.

Learn the most common chengyu first

If you don’t love chengyu, I suggest you learn the most common ones. The general rule is that if you hear a chengyu three times in different situations, it’s probably worth learning it. An alternative is to check this article by Carl Fordham, where he gathers 20 chengyu that are actually useful.

In addition, note that there is no direct relationship between how interesting a chengyu story is and how useful the chengyu is. People who write about chengyu for learners tend to focus on the chengyu that have the most interesting stories, not those that are most useful. Interesting stories are great for reading practice, though!

A question of efficiency

The real reason I think students should spend less time on chengyu is that the effort it takes to learn to use a chengyu is several times greater than that required to learn most ordinary words and phrases. Unless you already have a very broad vocabulary, it’s also likely that these ordinary words and phrases are more useful.

Thus, you get more value for your time and effort by focusing on high-frequency vocabulary. Some chengyu qualify as high-frequency vocabulary, so learn those and leave the rest for later.

I’m not saying that learning to use chengyu is a complete waste of time, nor that they lack cultural significance, but I am saying that you probably have more important things to learn. If you enjoy reading chengyu stories (in Chinese), then do so; it’s excellent reading practice, but don’t think that chengyu will unlock advanced Chinese.

Editor’s note: This article, originally published in 2013, was rewritten from scratch and massively updated in April, 2024.