Summary: Murder, wiretapping and blackmail aside, our focus today is actually on a more pedestrian form of linguistic crime: the way many Chinese speakers are managing to butcher mandarin by virtue of not understanding its origins. Specifically, today we focus on five useful idioms that almost every single native speaker now uses to mean the exact opposite of what they actually mean. This is more difficult show than most of our intermediate lessons, since we spend a bit of time talking about classical Chinese, but if you're looking to push your way past colloquial mandarin into our upper level, we think you'll find this really useful. In addition to covering some extremely useful chengyu, in the next fifteen minutes you'll learn more about their origins than most native speakers ever will, knowledge we expect you to put to good use at your own discretion.
