As a native Chinese speaker, I use xiehouyu in everyday conversations and at work. Through three examples, I’ll show how these sayings work, what makes them so expressive, and why they can be difficult to translate into English.

You lent someone money a few months ago. They promised to repay you, but every time you ask, there’s another excuse.

When you mention this to a Chinese friend, they reply:

肉包子打狗

“Throwing a meat-filled bun at a dog.”

What does a meat bun have to do with your money?

Well, think about what happens when you throw a delicious bun at a hungry dog. The dog eats it, and you’re never getting it back.

Neither, your friend suspects, will you get your money back.

The complete Chinese saying is:

肉包子打狗 — — 有去无回 / 肉包子打狗 — — 有去無回

Throwing a meat-filled bun at a dog — gone, never to return.

(The opening, 肉包子打狗, is written identically in simplified and traditional Chinese.)

Instead of simply saying, “You’ll never see that money again,” your friend has turned your predicament into an absurd little picture. It’s not particularly good news, but there’s something amusing about the way it’s delivered.

This is a xiehouyu (歇后语 / 歇後語), a distinctive form of traditional Chinese proverb. And your friend has used only half of it.

Why Say Only Half?

A xiehouyu consists of two parts.

The first part, the setup, presents a scene. It might involve animals, food, household objects, historical figures, or an imagined, sometimes absurd situation.

The second part, the answer, reveals the meaning behind that scene.

In our example, throwing a meat bun at a dog is the setup. “Gone, never to return” is the answer.

Together, they form a complete xiehouyu.

But in everyday conversation, a speaker may leave out the answer. If the listener already knows the expression, the setup alone is enough to bring the missing part to mind.

English speakers do something similar when they say, “When in Rome…” without finishing the proverb. The listener supplies the rest.

What makes xiehouyu especially entertaining is that the opening often invites the listener to imagine a vivid, sometimes absurd scene. Recognizing how that scene connects to the meaning is part of the pleasure.

These expressions are not merely relics of traditional Chinese culture. They still turn up in informal conversations among friends, family members, and acquaintances. Their popularity and familiarity vary from person to person, of course, but many remain recognizable parts of spoken Chinese.

And the connection between the two halves isn’t always as straightforward as a meat-filled bun disappearing into a dog’s mouth.

Sometimes, it depends on a clever play on words.

When a Flower Pretends to Be Garlic

Consider this one:

水仙不开花 — — 装蒜 / 水仙不開花 — — 裝蒜

A narcissus that hasn’t bloomed yet — pretending to be garlic.

Why would a flower pretend to be garlic?

Before a narcissus blooms, its bulb and green shoots can resemble those of garlic. Without its flowers, it looks rather like garlic growing in a pot.

So far, it’s simply an amusing comparison.

But the wordplay comes in the answer: 装蒜 / 裝蒜.

Literally, 装蒜 / 裝蒜 means “pretending to be garlic.” Figuratively, it means “playing dumb” — pretending not to know something you actually know.

Imagine someone who clearly knows what happened but insists they haven’t the slightest idea.

A friend might tease them with just three words:

“水仙不开花! / 水仙不開花!”

To someone unfamiliar with xiehouyu, this would sound bizarre. Why suddenly talk about a flower?

But someone who recognizes the expression immediately understands the accusation: Stop playing dumb.

The effect is different from stating that accusation directly. Depending on the speaker’s tone and relationship with the listener, the image might make everyone laugh, soften the criticism, or give it an extra sting.

It’s also the kind of wordplay that loses something in translation. English can explain the two meanings of 装蒜 / 裝蒜, but the phrase doesn’t carry those same meanings naturally in English.

Other xiehouyu draw their meaning not from wordplay, but from stories familiar to generations of Chinese speakers.

Fishing with a Straight Hook and No Bait

According to an old Chinese legend, an elderly man named Jiang Taigong sat fishing beside a river.

But there was something very strange about his technique.

His fishing hook was straight rather than curved. He used no bait. In some versions of the story, his hook didn’t even touch the water.

He couldn’t possibly catch a fish that way.

And that was the point.

Jiang Taigong wasn’t really waiting for fish. He was waiting for someone who would appreciate his talents and give him an opportunity to put them to use.

According to the legend, he eventually attracted the attention of King Wen of Zhou, who came to value him as an adviser.

This story gave rise to a familiar xiehouyu:

姜太公钓鱼 — — 愿者上钩 / 姜太公釣魚 — — 願者上鉤

Jiang Taigong goes fishing — whoever is willing may take the hook.

The expression suggests that people are free to accept an offer or arrangement if they wish. In some contexts, it can also imply that someone willingly takes the bait, even when doing so may not be wise.

Imagine a claw machine at an arcade, packed with tempting stuffed animals. You watch player after player feed money into it, only to see the claw drop each toy before reaching the prize chute.

Nobody is urging anyone else to play. Yet another person steps forward, pays, and tries their luck.

A Chinese friend watching this might remark, “姜太公钓鱼 / 姜太公釣魚.”

They know they may lose their money, but nobody is forcing them to take the chance.

An ancient legend about a peculiar fisherman has become a way of commenting on an ordinary modern situation.

And for listeners familiar with the story, the mention of Jiang Taigong fishing is enough to recall the straight hook, the unusual encounter, and the meaning behind it.

That’s quite a lot for a few words to convey.

More Than a Clever Way to Say Something

Of course, none of these situations requires a xiehouyu.

You could simply say:

“That money is never coming back.”

“Stop playing dumb.”

“They know the risk, but they’re choosing to take it.”

The meaning would be clear.

But everyday conversation isn’t just about passing information from one person to another. How we say something also conveys our feelings and attitudes, and helps shape our relationships with others.

A well-chosen xiehouyu can make an ordinary remark more vivid. It can turn frustration into a moment of shared amusement, express disapproval without a direct accusation, or make a pointed observation more memorable.

And there’s a particular pleasure in understanding a reference without needing it explained.

One person mentions a familiar scene, and the other instantly supplies the unstated answer. Both recognize the same connection. The shared knowledge becomes part of the exchange.

This is one reason xiehouyu works so well in casual conversation. It invites the listener to participate, rather than merely receive a statement.

But sometimes the reverse happens: people use only the answer, without the setup.

This is especially common when the answer is already a word or established expression in its own right. 装蒜 / 裝蒜 (“playing dumb”) works perfectly well without mentioning the narcissus. So does 有去无回 / 有去無回 (“gone, never to return”).

The latter is also a chengyu (成语 / 成語), a type of compact fixed expression that often consists of four characters. Some xiehouyu answers are chengyu themselves and can be used independently in speech or writing. Someone using such an expression may not even have the full xiehouyu in mind.

Not every use of xiehouyu is humorous, and not every listener will recognize every expression. Some are affectionate or playful; others are sarcastic, critical, or even quite harsh. Much depends on who is speaking, to whom, and in what circumstances.

The scenes themselves are equally varied. Some come from cooking, farming, animals, and household activities. Others draw on historical figures, traditional stories, or the peculiarities of the Chinese language.

Familiar xiehouyu continue to find their way into conversations about money, relationships, work, misunderstandings, and the small absurdities of daily life.

And when both speakers know the expression, the scene alone may be enough.

The other half is left for the listener to supply.

If you’d like to explore more, my book Why Say Only Half? looks at 53 traditional xiehouyu, exploring the stories, wordplay, and everyday wisdom behind them.

Why Do Chinese Speakers Sometimes Say Only Half a Proverb? was originally published in Language Lab on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Okay, be honest with yourself for one second before you keep scrolling.

How many languages have you started in your life?

Two? Five? Twelve, if you count the streaks you abandoned somewhere around day 9?

You’re sinning. Linguistically speaking.

I’ve taught languages for 8 years. I have a philology degree, and I’ve watched hundreds of students: beginners, intermediate, advanced, all of them — fall into the same seven traps.

And every single one has a name straight out of Dante’s Inferno, except instead of circles of hell, we’re talking circles of “why can’t I just finish this German course.”

Grab your coffee. Let’s confess.

1. Pride: “I Basically Already Speak This Language”

“Grammar exercises? At my level? Please.”

Pride shows up early, and it’s sneaky.

I’ll tell you a personal one. I studied Polish at university, and I can’t count how many times my fellow Ukrainians laughed at me for it.

“Polish is basically Ukrainian with an accent.”

They’d say.

“You’ll understand everything in a week.”

Guess what happened to most of them when they actually had to learn it?

Years. It took years.

Because understanding and responding are two completely different muscles. You can nod along to a Polish grandmother’s entire life story and still freeze the second someone asks you a question back.

There’s another version of this sin, and it’s an expensive one.

“I speak good English, I don’t need to prep for IELTS, I’ll just wing it”

Oh dude.

IELTS, Goethe, DELF, DELE — these exams don’t test whether you “know the language.” They test whether you know the exam. The format, the timing, the scoring criteria, the specific phrasing traps. I’ve seen genuinely fluent speakers walk out with a mediocre score simply because they’d never seen how a Speaking Part 2 card actually works.

And here’s the second face of this sin, and I want you to be honest with yourself.

Have you ever reached a B1 level and told someone their English or French “doesn’t count” because they dropped an article? Been that person in the comments correcting a beginner’s grammar like you’re the Académie Française? Confess. You have, haven’t you?

That condescension dressed up as expertise? That’s pride too.

Your absolution: find someone who will correct you even when it’s uncomfortable, and if an exam is coming, study the exam itself. Pride doesn’t survive contact with an honest tutor or a real practice test.

2. Sloth: Calling It “Immersion”

“I watch German YouTube every night, when does fluency just… happen?”
— DM I got from a student.

Never. I’m sorry.

Here’s the scene, and you know it: German video playing in the background, tea in one hand, phone in the other, texting your friend about something completely unrelated. Your eyes technically point at the screen. Your brain is somewhere else entirely.

That’s not immersion because that’s a nap with subtitles.

Real listening comprehension needs active attention — noticing structures, catching words you don’t know, actually processing sound instead of letting it wash over you like ambient noise.

Sound familiar yet?

Your absolution: pause the video. Rewind one line. Say it out loud yourself before pressing play again. Shadowing turns background noise into an actual workout.

3. Gluttony: Hoarding Resources You Never Touch

“I have 4 apps, 3 textbooks, and a Notion vocabulary tracker for Spanish, what do u have??”
— spotted in the comments under a language-learning reel.

• There’s a very specific type of person who hoards stationery. Beautiful notebooks. Perfect pens.
• There’s an identical type of person who hoards books. A whole library of novels, spines uncracked, purely decorative.
• And there’s a third type — you, maybe — who hoards French materials, or Spanish courses, or German grammar PDFs, collecting them like Pokémon cards and opening approximately none of them.

Same sin. Different shelf.

The fix: one core method, one supplementary tool. That’s the whole budget. Finish something before you buy a third thing.

4. Envy: My Personal Favorite Sin (We All Have One)

“This girl speaks 4 languages fluently, and she’s only 19”
— overheard in Threads

I’ll admit it. Envy is the sin I relate to the most.

We scroll Instagram and YouTube watching other people’s “successful success,” and we never once ask: is this actually true? What did it cost them?

Have you ever seen one of those “5 am study girl” routines? Some Korean student’s day starting at 5 am with study materials and ending at 11 pm with the same study materials, and twelve hours of studying crammed in between?

That’s the part nobody shows you before you compare yourself to it.

Would you actually want that life? Or do you just want the result?

And here’s the twist: that person who “speaks 4 languages fluently”? Sometimes that means they learned a few dozen tourist phrases in three of them and call it fluency for the caption.

Your absolution: compare yourself to your own recording from 3 months ago. That’s the only fair comparison that exists.

5. Wrath: Throwing the Grammar Book

I’ll give you my own confession here.

I quit English repeatedly because I hated the Present Perfect and Continuous tenses with a genuine passion. Every single time, I’d slam the grammar book shut, throw it onto a shelf, and abandon it for six months to a year. Then I’d come back, restart from Present Simple as if nothing happened, get comfortable again, hit the hard part again, and quit again.

A whole cycle. On repeat. For years.

Maybe your rage trigger isn’t tenses. Maybe it’s genders in German, or subjunctive in French, or those brutal Polish case endings. Sound about right?

Anger at a specific grammar point is normal. Letting it end your entire learning journey is the actual sin.

Your absolution: isolate the thing you hate, drill only that thing in tiny 10-minute doses, and stop treating one grammar rule like it represents the whole language.

6. Greed: “Fluent by Next Month, Thanks”

“I need conversational English for a job interview in 3 weeks, I have one hour a week, can you help?”
 — a message every tutor has received at least once

This one is the bane of every teacher’s existence. I mean it.

Someone messages me needing to pass university admissions in a month, or start a new job in three, with exactly 1 free hour per week to make it happen. The math simply doesn’t exist. CEFR research puts B2 in a language close to English — French, German — at roughly 600 to 750 guided study hours.

One hour a week gets you there in about… 12 years.

And you know who profits from that gap between hope and math?

Half the marketing in the language-course industry runs entirely on greed. “Fluent in 90 days.” “Master German while you sleep.” They’re selling you the shortcut your brain desperately wants to believe exists.

Interesting, right? I actually wrote a whole piece on exactly how these courses exploit that impatience — link below.

The Fairy Tale Language Courses Keep Selling You

Your absolution: set realistic goals and plan your calendar around them. Decide what you want to achieve, then look honestly at how much time you actually have. Not sure if your timeline makes sense? Ask a tutor — or ChatGPT. Better to find out before you build your entire plan around a deadline that was never realistic in the first place.

7. Lust: Obsessing Over Sounding Native

This is the cruelest sin, because it usually catches people after they’ve beaten all 6 others.

You fixed your pride. You stopped being lazy. You decluttered your apps, stopped comparing yourself to Instagram polyglots, made peace with grammar, set realistic timelines. And then this shows up: a mix of perfectionism and impostor syndrome.

“She learned the language, but her accent is such a horrible mix of American and British. I’m learning only the British accent. I would never mix things like taxi and cab.”

And this is where I have to ask: why does it matter?

You can spend years trying to sound like one very specific version of a native speaker while millions of native speakers themselves sound completely different from one another.

So what if your accent gives you away?

Your accent is proof that you speak more than one language, which is a flex, not a flaw.

Your absolution: stop chasing native. Chase to be understood. Record yourself, fix what’s actually unclear, and let your accent be exactly what it is.

So yes, the seven deadly sins were mostly a joke.

Mostly.

Because if you recognised yourself in at least one of them, there’s probably a little truth hiding behind the joke too.

Language learning doesn’t have to be complicated, but it does require honesty with yourself. Be realistic about your goals. Use your resources instead of collecting them. Accept corrections. Stop comparing your progress to someone else’s highlight reel. And when things get difficult, don’t assume that difficulty means you’re bad at languages.

Most importantly, don’t lose motivation.

And honestly? It probably won’t leave you if you stay persistent. You don’t need to feel excited about your language every single day. You just need to keep coming back to it.

I’ve committed at least four of these sins myself across different languages, and I still teach for a living. So if you’re guilty too, welcome to the club.

Which sin got you? Tell me in the comments.

More honest takes on language learning and useful resources to make it easier. Follow me here on Medium, and find my products through the link in my bio.

The 7 Deadly Sins of Language Learning (You’re Probably Guilty of More Than One) was originally published in Language Lab on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.