Chinese idioms One of the most difficult aspects of Chinese is to learn is the so-called idioms or chengyu (成语). In general, they refer to short sentences composed of four characters that allude to some historical fact or literary anecdote from ancient times. Its...

The character chai 拆- dismantle One of the most frequent characters in the urban scenery of the China of the development and the transformation is chai 拆- dismantle.  Any walk through the old neighborhoods of most Chinese cities continually led to being confronted...

The Peach, fruit of immortality In my "Manual of Writing Chinese Characters" (1) I hold an opinion contrary to that of most scholars of Chinese characters, and that is that the formation of the so-called picto-phonetic characters responds not only to the composition...