Chinese Language Forums - Chinese Etymology Institute

The meaning of a sentence of all languages arises from its composing vocabulary and its grammatical rules. For English, the majority of the vocabulary are words. That is, everyone with an English dictionary can read and comprehend English sentences. However, this is not the case for Chinese. By knowing every word of a Chinese sentence might not be able to understand its meaning. This is because that most of Chinese vocabulary are composed of word-phrases, not words (character) alone, such as,
蝴 蝶 (butterfly), 密 蜂 (bee), etc..

Thus, the advanced Chinese etymology material is about word-phrases.

Here is a place for discussing Chinese word phrases.

If you know a lot of Chinese words but are still unable to read Chinese newspaper, here is the place for you to get to the next level.

If you know some very interesting new word phrases, please share them with us too.