There are thousands of 4 letter idioms in Chinese and I believe in Japanese too, a very common game in China is a group of people each say a 4 letter idiom and next person say another that starts with the last letter of the last one said.
It makes for a fun bridging the gap cultural experience when talking to Chinese people about the Chinese idioms you learn in Japanese class. Even the pronunciation is so similar (I mean, of course it is, duh).
My favorite one is ???? or ???? (Wú Yuè tóng zhou) meaning people of different backgrounds finding themselves having to work together.
It's mostly a Japanese thing. In Chinese we don't have a lot of words for particular aesthetic qualities. However, if you want profane homophonic puns or pithy four-word idioms ...
Definitely not obvious if not pointed out like this to me, but the words generally spread fast once somebody points it out which the chance is almost 100%.
To be fair, I knew HongKong and GuangZhou area are still very traditional, rooted with a lot of these ancient Chinese language games. People there might be much more conscientious looking for word games than I do.
That doesn’t have the structure of a Chinese proverb. Those are usually 4 character expressions, which work out to something like 4 nouns/verbs in English plus some supporting prepositions and whatnot. The other common thing is highly parallel constructions, but that just repeats the same word three times. I would be very surprised if that were an authentic Chinese saying.
Hehe, one of the cool things about learning each other's spoken languages, is you get more memes, in other languages. I have a handful of fun Chinese phrases to whip out like "you're effin' annoying" or ways of calling each other idiots :)
The Chinese language great for puns not only because so many characters sound the same, with tons of idioms understood nationwide. Because the language is character based, abbreviations of words are made of full characters and may have their own meanings. As someone graduating from the department of computer science, the most classic joke is to shorten the name of the department into "whorehouse". (????? ji4 suan4 ji1 xue2 yuan4 => ?? ji4 yuan4 ~ ?? ji4 yuan4)
Yes, it is very common to use exaggerations in Chinese and when a certain exaggeration is widely accepted, its figurative meaning took over its literal character-by-character meaning. So when the idiom is used, the four characters are interpreted as one word that describes its figurative meaning.
Let me give you an example: in ancient Chinese it is a standard greeting to wish the emperor to live ten thousand years, literally. But everyone understands that it just means very long life.
These are also common ones. It's also transplanted onto a bunch of other less well known non-sinitic languages like Khitan, Jurchen, Okinawan, Zhuang etc.
> the word ‘four’ in Mandarin sounds similar to the word for ‘death’
The hotel attached to the Shanghai airport doesn't have a 4th floor... or more accurately it's labelled as the 5th floor.
The superstition is real, and more potent than western numerological superstitions such as 13 - the fact that number sounds resemble other meanings in Chinese seems like a valid explanation.
As someone with some exposure to Chinese characters as a Japanese speaker, I’ve had the please to casually glance a WeChat group and realize some of the back channel Chinese from my teammates was joking about trying to get me fired.
(Edit: my also Chinese manager dealt with it very well and that person left the company after some time)
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