A friend said his son’s Chinese composition used the idiom “日丽风和” but the teacher marked it wrong (deduct one mark) and wrote the supposedly correct version “风和日丽” beside it. My friend was perplexed because he was pretty sure that his son got it right but they just didn’t know how to “challenge” the teacher.
Let’s see if we can help him with a step-by-step simplified explanation that 风和日丽=日丽风和:
- “风和日丽” is a combination of two compound words(合成词): 风和+日丽
- The compound word 风和 is formed by two root words(词根): 风+和 in which “和” is a predicate that describes the subject “风”. This type of compound word structure is known as subject-predicate (主谓结构).
- The same goes for 日丽 which has the same subject-predicate structure (主谓结构).
- When you have two compound words of similar structure combined to form an idiom (成语)，then the resulting idiom (成语) will have a joint structure (联合式成语).
- One main characteristic of a joint structure 成语 is that you can swap the order of the first and second part yet the meaning of the 成语 remain unchanged. (There are exceptions of course but let’s leave it to another time)
- So, we have 风和日丽=日丽风和 to describe 天气晴朗温和.
More examples: 卧虎藏龙 = 藏龙卧虎，甜言蜜语 = 蜜语甜言，天长地久 = 地久天长 etc
I hope this will help to convince the kid’s teacher to change his/her mind.
成语结构一览
除了上述的联合结构，成语其它主要的结构有：主谓结构（八仙过海）、动宾结构（饱经沧桑）、补充结构（爱不释手）、偏正结构（腹背受敌）等。
