/sɛ dy ʃinwa/ lit. ‘it’s Chinese’
French idiom, familiar. I can’t understand any of it.
Draft Not yet checked by a native French speaker.
How do people use C’est du chinois
?
Familiar but not rude, so you can say it at work about a contract or at home about the instructions for the dishwasher. Add “pour moi” to make it personal: “pour moi, c’est du chinois” or “c’est du chinois pour moi”. The verb moves with the tense: “c’était du chinois”, “ce sera du chinois”.
Also said c’est du chinois pour moi, pour moi, c’est du chinois
C’est du chinois
in real sentences
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Pour moi, c’est du chinois.
It’s all Greek to me.
Tatoeba, sentence by Adelpa, translation by Zifre, CC BY 2.0 FR
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Pour moi, c’était du chinois.
That was all Greek to me.
Tatoeba, sentence by gasche, translation by blay_paul, CC BY 2.0 FR
Where does C’est du chinois
come from?
French Wiktionary says it’s simply a nod to how hard Chinese is to learn, with its unfamiliar characters. The oldest example it quotes for the figurative sense is from 1890, about a French boy at an English school whose new classmates’ talk “furent du chinois” for weeks. Serge Gainsbourg put it in a 1961 song title, “Les femmes c’est du chinois”, as English Wiktionary notes.
Mistakes learners make with C’est du chinois
Capitalizing it. Language names are lowercase in French, so it’s “du chinois”, never “du Chinois” (which would mean a Chinese person). And don’t translate the English: “c’est du grec” isn’t the usual French version.
Other French idioms like C’est du chinois
Spot a mistake in C’est du chinois
?
Send a correction, or a sentence you’d actually say with it. Everything is read before anything on this page changes.