Need help with the following Chinese idioms....

[Michael P.]

In our Chinese Class, we often discuss about Chinese idioms and sometimes we have to do some homework  that contain some Chinese idioms. Recently I had to  learn following Chinese idioms:

源远流场的 (历史和传说) (yuan yuan liu chang)

无中生有 ( wu zhong sheng you)

不月而同 (bu yue er tong)

I am sorry that I did not write the tones for the characters but I really don't know how I can do that on my keyboard. _-> so I provided Pinyin only.

I did some research about those 成语 but I could not find any good entries with example sentences in my dictionary.

Could someone possibly provide some nice examples for those 成语 and maybe suggest a good chinese idioms dictionary? that would be lovely :angel:

[BWL]

无中生有 is fairly commonly used even in casual spoken Chinese. It comes from ancient Taoist philosophy meaning to create something out of nothing or to fantasise about something that is not meant to be.

无 (無 in traditional Chinese) is an old Chinese word for "nothing" and is used to form the negative in compound words like 无线 or "wireless". It is not so commonly used by itself in Mandarin but is still very common in southern dialects like Cantonese and Fujianese where it is used to mean "don't have" or "it doesn't exist". In Cantonese it can be used as a prohibitive as well. If you ever watch a Hong Kong movie in Cantonese and hear the characters say "Mou, mou!", well that is 无 being used to mean "No, no!" or "Don't do it, don't do it!".

This link has some very good explanations for common Chinese idioms.

http://www.purplepanda.com.au/Idiom/pure-fantasy.aspx

无中 thus means "in the middle of nothingness" while 生有 means "life or birth exists", or in more idiomatic English "something out of nothing".

[lookforuu]

源远流场: 源远流长    yuán yuǎn liú cháng      Means something has a long history.

不月而同：不约而同  bù yuē ér tóng                Means people doing same thing without having agreed or discussed before. 

For pinyin you may check it here, type the words in the search bar, it will come up with pinyin and meaning of the word (in Chinese though):

http://www.chazidian.com/r_chengyu_fd21cb46198f140da09a5527eeabaec2/