Proverb Assistance: Enemy’s Enemy
This tiny article at Wikipedia gives the Chinese credit for the proverb:
“The enemy of my enemy is my friend.”
as well as:
“It is good to strike the serpent’s head with your enemy’s hand.”
But there are no references for either. I’d like to learn the Chinese for one or both of those.
So can anyone confirm that those are actually Chinese idioms by giving us the hanzi for either?
On a more general note, this little wèntí 问题 clearly shows one the of the gaps in the Chinese-learning resources market: a complete and easily searchable proverb and idiom dictionary for Chinese and English. Does anyone have a favorite they’d like to recommend?
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5 Responses to “Proverb Assistance: Enemy’s Enemy”
gweipo
said:
Asiapac books (www.asiapacbooks.com) which I think is from Singapore has a few books with popular Chinese proverbs which are nicely illustrated with cartoons.
Comment date: Jun 19, 2010
nina
said:
You can try this one, although it’s not perfect. http://www.chinese-tools.com/chinese/chengyu/dictionary
Comment date: Jun 20, 2010
Pete
said:
I use an iPhone application called KTdict C-E. It uses CC-CEDICT’s dictionary data, and there are thousands of chengyu, equivalent English idioms in Chinese, etc.
http://www.klausthul.com/ktdict/
Comment date: Jun 20, 2010
Anatol
said:
I think it goes like this:
“The enemy of my enemy is my friend.”
敌人的敌人是我的朋友 (Dírén de dírén shì wǒ de péngyǒu)
This one has some useful ones:
http://www.chinesedic.com/?langue=CN&q=slight+present+but+weighty+meaning+(idiom)
Comment date: Jun 25, 2010
Nick
said:
This is disappointing but apparently the proverb is 20th century American. Or so says the Little Oxford Dictionary of Proverbs. If it makes you feel any better, I searched baidu and lots of Chinese people think it is Chinese; a few even attributed it to Mao. Apparently it is more often claimed to be Arabic. Orientalism in action! (also, the second quote could be Kannada but Oxford says it is English)
Comment date: Aug 16, 2010