Chengyu (成语） Dictionary

[Mr_Jefferson_]

As teachers will tell you, to score high in your Chinese SL/SLA Exam, you'll want to use chengyu in your sentences in Section C. What the teachers don't tell you often (at least mine did not) was what chengyu meant what and where to use it. Usually my teacher would give me a stack of essays, make me highlight the chengyu and then define them myself. However, with the help of KONG03 (Jonathan) , we made a little dictionary of chengyu (not sure if it has been done already) and we would like to share it with everyone else because it seemed to help us a lot.

Chengyu Dictionary:

Dictionary (Google Docs)

The dictionary is separated by categories (which might be incorrect ) for specific Chengyu to help when writing essays and you want to pull a specific one out for a specific theme. To access the categories, there's a document outline which has all the themes linked in the document. The dictionary  shows the characters of the chengyu (duh), the pinyin, the English definition and the chengyu being used in a sentence.

The dictionary is far from finished and we would love it if you wanted to give us suggestions or edit it. We also made a copy of the dictionary which is fully editable to let you add Chengyu that we missed or fix up the themes (we really need help with that). We'll be moderating it often for changes and edit the read-only document accordingly.

Editable Document (Google Docs)

Hope this helps & Good luck to all

Feedback is welcome!!!

[turtlesforeveryone]

This is a great idea! I particularly like how you've separated them into easily sortable categories. I'll definitely try adding to it when I have the time!

[Mr_Jefferson_]

This is a great idea! I particularly like how you've separated them into easily sortable categories. I'll definitely try adding to it when I have the time!

Thanks! Gotta give credit to KONG03 for starting it though. Hope to see some of your additions soon!

[msandler2009]

It's all fine and well to use chengyu, but that being said, it isn't necessary to do so to get a high mark and in some cases it can even lower one's mark. Many students struggle to use memorise chengyu, and even more struggle to apply it appropriately. For those students it is far preferable to master the use of relatively simple language and apply it well. After all, so long as your essay is logical, addresses the topic and is grammatically correct no one can score it less for its lack of chengyu. When students cram chengyu, they often fail to remember them correctly, or they apply them in the wrong context or they simply complicate something which needn't be complicated. So while it's good to learn some universal chengyu, I think in this case quality vs quantity applies, and quality can be achieved with little chengyu.

[Mr_Jefferson_]

It's all fine and well to use chengyu, but that being said, it isn't necessary to do so to get a high mark and in some cases it can even lower one's mark. Many students struggle to use memorise chengyu, and even more struggle to apply it appropriately. For those students it is far preferable to master the use of relatively simple language and apply it well. After all, so long as your essay is logical, addresses the topic and is grammatically correct no one can score it less for its lack of chengyu. When students cram chengyu, they often fail to remember them correctly, or they apply them in the wrong context or they simply complicate something which needn't be complicated. So while it's good to learn some universal chengyu, I think in this case quality vs quantity applies, and quality can be achieved with little chengyu.

Well put. Indeed using chengyu does not necessarily boost your marks drastically but it can help with those that aim for a really high mark. Students shouldn't use chengyu if they are not confident with the language, not to mention cram their essay with chengyu they don't know. However, we made this dictionary for those high achievers to learn new chengyu and make their writing richer not encourage people to memorise all of them and use as much as possible. Chengyu is the little step that will get you a better mark against someone that writes like you but does not use them at all.

In short, yes you're right. Using chengyu requires practice and mastery and we hope that this will give people the opportunity to try some out and show their teacher/tutor, master their usage and hopefully avoid ruining their essay with words they don't know