Chinese Proverbs and Sayings

📖 About This Tool

In an essay, a speech, or a talk with a child, what is missing is rarely the reasoning but the old saying. "An inch of time is an inch of gold" lands far better than "you should value your time". Old sayings are hard to find because they are scattered across books, and you usually remember only half of one. This tool gathers them by theme.

Entries fall into twelve categories. Time, encouragement and study are the three most used in essays. Getting along, friendship and unity cover how people deal with one another. Thrift and health cover daily living. Satire is the most fun: a phrase like grass on a wall that leans whichever way the wind blows makes a point faster than any argument. The bars on the side show which category is thickest.

There are two ways in. Pick a category, then set how many to show, and read through. Or type a keyword: if all you recall is a single word, typing it pulls up every entry containing it. The two combine, so you can search inside one category for a narrower result.

Today picks one entry fixed by the calendar date, unchanged when you refresh on the same day, which suits a blackboard corner or a daily line. When you need a batch, random draws ten or twenty at once, ready for handouts. Results can be copied or exported to CSV with a category column for your own sorting. Everything runs locally.

Zhuyin, also called Bopomofo, writes a syllable with symbols rather than letters: up to three symbols for the initial, the medial and the final, plus a tone mark. It is the system taught in Taiwan and printed beside characters in children's books there, so anyone reading those materials or helping a child with homework runs into it.

Tones are marked as in the standard scheme: the light level tone is usually left unmarked, while second, third and fourth carry their own diacritic and the neutral tone takes a dot. Conversion runs character by character with phrase lookup where the reading differs from the sum of the parts, which matters for the handful of characters whose reading changes in connected speech. The library holds common characters, and anything outside it is reported as not converted so coverage is visible. Taiwanese pronunciation variants are not distinguished; standard reading is given.

✨ Features

• Browse by category: twelve themes, pick one to list everything in it.
• Keyword search: find a saying from half a line, combinable with category.
• Today: fixed by date, one entry per day.
• Random draw: a batch at a time, ready for handouts.
• Breakdown: bars showing how many entries each category holds.
• Copy and export: as text or CSV with the category column.

🚀 How to Use

1. Choose a category, or type a keyword straight away.
2. Set how many to show, twenty by default, or all.
3. Press search and the entries list below with their category.
4. For a ready batch, press random to draw from the current category.
5. Copy or export CSV to keep the result.

⚠️ Notes

• Coverage: common entries; strongly regional dialect sayings may be missing.
• One category each: a saying that fits two themes is filed under one.
• Show count: a ceiling only; fewer are shown when fewer match.
• Random draw: differs each time; use search and export for fixed content.
• Nothing is saved: refreshing clears results, so export in time.