One of the aspects of language and communication that I find really interesting are idioms.

We all have favourite phrases that we use to describe a situation, the same ones we probably heard our parents or friends use as we were growing up.

I’m talking about the common phrases like, “a rolling stone gathers no moss”, “where there’s a will, there’s a way”, and “better to be silent and thought a fool than to open one’s mouth and remove all doubt”.

You’ll hear them everywhere – on television, on the radio and anywhere that people are talking because they’re a standard part of colloquial speech.

The funny thing is that I never considered that the idioms I commonly used might have their own counterparts in other languages. But of course they do.

I encountered one this evening while I was talking to my friend in Beijing.