Book Review- Gems of the Chinese Language Through the Ages- The Stories behind 100 Chinese Idioms

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This is a summary of my impressions of the book Gems of the Chinese Language Through the Ages-The Stories Behind 100 Chinese Idioms (Chinese-English) 博古通今学汉语丛书—典故100（汉英对照)". Many thanks to Elina for allowing me to review this book as part of Sinolingua's giveaway promotion.

 

Book Setup

 

As the title indicates, this book introduces 100 idioms and includes a brief story (about half a page long) describing where they came from. There is a table of contents at the beginning so you can easily find a specific idiom/story and locate it in the book. For each idiom, it has the story written in both English and Chinese. In the Chinese section, some of the less commonly used 漢字 also have the pinyin so you can pronounce it. There were a few typos that I noticed in the English part, but nothing that would cause the meaning to be lost.

 

Who could Use It

Anybody!  If you are interested in learning about Chinese culture and traditional stories this would be an excellent resource regardless of your Mandarin level. If your level is advanced you could challenge yourself by reading the Chinese part and check it with the English. It's likely that some of the vocabulary in these stories will be quite new, but not necessarily useful for everyday speaking. I enjoyed reading through the English versions of the stories because it was different from anything I'd gotten in Chinese class. Even the idioms I'd been taught by teachers and friends tended to be translations of English sayings, so reading this book was interesting because I got some exposure to "authentic" Chinese idioms.

 

Conclusion

It's an interesting read, but I don't know how useful it is. At my current level, I feel like it might sound a little weird if I tried using some of these idioms when speaking with people. I'm using it as a fun break from studying when I'm tired of writing and memorizing words, but maybe someone who is quite advanced and interested in studying classical Chinese texts would get more practical use out of it.