Originally Posted by
STS-134
I asked my wife about that. She said it's a story about a guy who drops his sword off a boat, marks the spot on the boat where he dropped his sword, then goes back home and thinks he can jump off the boat at the marked spot and look for the sword. I asked how she knows the story and she said it was in her elementary school textbook. Is this some Chinese version of "The Boy Who Cried Wolf" or "The Three Little Pigs" that everyone just somehow knows?
There's a collection of chengyu (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chengyu) and 俗语 (suyu, or adages) that are somewhat commonly used in Chinese. It's more popular among literary articles and older people’s speech, not as much in casual conversation unless you just want to flex your Chinese skills.
If you are learning Chinese as a second language it is a proper pain because knowing each individual character of the phrase is often meaningless unless you know the underlying story (e.g. what does "
mark boat seek sword" mean without the story?). In addition modern Chinese has a lot of new slang, made up words, and carryover words from English that mean something completely different than the English term which adds other levels of complexity.
some examples:
躺平 - originally means to lie down; now is similar to the western concept of “antiwork” or “avoiding the rat race”
Ins - everyone else in the world calls Instagram IG but Chinese people call it Ins
PK - stands for “player kill” in a video game, term is not commonly used in English but means “to fight each other 1v1” in Chinese