A Bird Frightened by the Sound of a Bowstring

Characters:

Pronunciation: jing(1) gong(1) zhi(1) niao(3)
Explanation: A metaphor to say someone is easily frightened because of an injured experience before

Tone: Neutral

The Story: There was a very famous archer named Geng Ying in Wei Kingdom. One day, he went hunting with the king, and when he saw a bird flying in the sky, he said to the king: "I can shoot a bird to the ground without sending my arrow." The king was shocked and said: "Are you really as skillful as that? I could not believe this!" After a while, a wild goose flew to them. Geng Ying pulled his bow and hit his bowstring, but did not launch his arrow. To everyone's surprise, the wild goose fell to the ground. The king said: "You are a great archer!"

Later Geng Ying explained: "It's a wounded wild goose. I can tell from its sorrowful cry and his languid fly. It is clear that it was hurt by bows before. When it heard the sound of the bowstring, it thought it was shot again, and so it fell down."

Usage Example (Pinyin): Ta(1) xian(4) zai(4) xiang(4) shi(4) jing(1) gong(1) zhi(1) niao(3), zai(4) shou(4) bu(4) liao ren(4) he(2) jing(1) xia(4).

Usage Example (English translation): She is like a bird frightened by the sound of a bowstring now, and can't stand any kind of scare.

Note: The spoken Chinese Mandarin language has 4 spoken tones. We have attempted to re-create those above where after each syllable we tell you (1), (2), (3), or (4) as they correspond to each of the 4 tones. We encourage you to complement your Xianzai.com Chinese Idioms newsletter with a good offline study program.