Three in the Morning and Four in the Evening

Characters:

Pronunciation: zhao(1) san(1) mu(4) si(4)

Explanation: Its original meaning was to describe a "cheat", and later it described someone is changeable and fickle.

Tone: negative

The Story: In the Song Dynasty, there was an acrobat who raised a dozen monkeys. After a while, he learned about the monkeys' personalities, and the monkeys could understand him too. Because of this, he loved the monkeys more and prepared more food for them.

Unfortunately, his family was short of food later, so he had to reduce the monkeys' meals. As he thought the monkeys might be unhappy about his, he said to them: "I will give you 3 chestnuts in the morning and 4 in the evening for each one, what do you think?" The monkeys were unsatisfied with it and began to make lots of noise.

After a while, he said to the monkeys: "Ok, if you think this is not enough, I'll change. How about 4 in the morning and 3 in the evening? I think you will be satisfied now!" When the monkeys heard this, they wagged their tails to show their satisfaction

Usage Example (Pinyin): Mei(2) you(3) gu(1) niang(2) xiang(3) jia(4) gei(3) zhao(1) san(1) mu(4) si(4) de nan(2) ren(2).

Usage Example (English translation): No girl wants to marry a "Three in the morning and four in the evening" man.

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.