Every culture has its idioms – compact, metaphor-rich phrases carrying an entire philosophy in a sentence. In Chinese, they're known as 成语 (chengyu), four-character expressions drawn from classical texts, historical episodes and philosophical treatises, many of them more than two thousand years old.

Their age, though, is not what makes them interesting. The fun begins when you put them next to proverbs from Europe, the Middle East, Africa, the Caucasus and the Slavic world, cultures that developed in other landscapes and under different political and intellectual traditions.

And yet, they keep arriving at the same conclusions and lessons, which raises an interesting question: if we have been saying many of the same things for centuries, why do we spend so much energy insisting on how different we are?

Today's chengyu is "The cow that wouldn't listen" or 对牛弹琴 (dui niu tan qin).

Picture the countryside outside an ancient Chinese town. Soft mist rolls over the mountains as lush green grass sways with the cool breeze. A musician named Gong Mingyi is walking with his guqin under his arm as he comes across a grazing cow. Mesmerized by the serenity of the scene, he sits down right there on the grass and begins to play, pouring all his skill into the performance that could make a room full of people go quiet in awe.

The cow, however, has other priorities. It does not even lift its head and just keeps chewing, completely indifferent to the music.

Mingyi is stunned, perhaps even a bit offended. He has given the performance everything he has. How could it simply fail to land? He tries again, then again, working his way through every tune he knows. The cow keeps grazing, magnificently unbothered.

Finally, Mingyi gives up on elegance and plays something crude, mimicking the whine of a gadfly and the bleat of a lost calf.

The cow's ears prick up as it looks around, suddenly alert.

That is the turning point of the story – the problem was never that the cow could not hear. Mingyi had simply chosen the wrong audience and stubbornly refused, until the very end, to speak in a language that the audience could understand.

This is the idea behind 对牛弹琴, literally "to play the qin to a cow." Chinese speakers still use it when someone pours brilliance into a conversation with a person who has no interest in, or capacity for, appreciating it.

Today, the expression can be aimed at either side: at the audience for failing to understand, or at the speaker for choosing the wrong audience in the first place.

The same idea, a different animal every time

And this is where things get interesting. Once you start looking, the same basic idea appears all over the world – something valuable being shared with the wrong recipient, with a slightly ridiculous mismatch between the two.

In English and much of the Christian world, we "cast pearls before swine." The image comes from the Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus warns his followers not to throw pearls before pigs because the pigs will trample them and turn on them. The expression entered English through Tyndale's 1526 New Testament and German through Luther's 1522 translation. Russian has its own version straight from the 1876 Synodal Bible, "не мечите бисер перед свиньями," or "do not cast pearls before swine."

Because the image is biblical, the same combination of pearls and pigs travelled remarkably far. Dutch, Polish, Italian, Hungarian, Slovak and Danish all have versions of essentially the same proverb.

France kept the pig but changed the treasure.

"Donner de la confiture aux cochons" means "to give jam to pigs." The story goes that pearls gradually gave way to jam, which was a luxury in medieval Europe. The object changed, but the idea did not: don't waste something fine on someone who has no appreciation for it.

Japan has several variations. One involves "gold coins before a cat"; another involves reciting Buddhist sutras into a horse's ear, closer to the idea of speaking to someone who simply isn't able to comprehend. 

Spanish-speaking cultures did not settle on a single version either. In Argentina, you can "give daisies to pigs" ("darle margaritas a los chanchos"). In Spain, it is "give sweets to a donkey" ("darle caramelos a un burro"). Spanish also has a whole family of related sayings, including "God gives bread to those who have no teeth" and "honey isn't made for a pig's mouth."

Romanian puts poultry in the starring role: "a strica orzul pe gâște," or wasting barley by feeding it to geese.

Tunisian and Moroccan Arabic take the idea somewhere else entirely: يعطي الحلاوة للي بلا ضروس or "yaati fil halwa lilli bla zrous," meaning giving candy to someone with no teeth. The joke is about capacity rather than worth. The candy may be perfectly good, but it is useless to the person receiving it.

Armenian has its own version of "էշն ինչ գիտի՝ նուշն ինչ է," meaning "What does the donkey know about almonds?" Give a donkey an almond and it will chew it the way it chews hay, as it has no idea that there is anything special about what it has just been given. 

This small change gives the proverb a different emotional tone.

"Pearls before swine" carries a moral charge. Pigs were considered unclean animals in the world that produced the biblical phrase, while the donkey and the almond are gentler. A donkey is not disgraceful. It is simply a donkey, hauling loads and eating whatever is put in front of it. When Armenian uses this image, it is not, "You have wasted something precious on someone unworthy." It is, "Of course this didn't land. What else did you expect?" And this makes the wisdom so much softer.

A larger pattern and the lesson

Put all these sayings next to each other and we see a pattern emerge.

Where the Bible travelled first, the pig was often referenced. Where the proverb grew out of local life rather than scripture, the animal became more specific to the culture using it.

China reaches for the ox that worked its fields. Japan has its cat and its horse. Romania has the geese in its yard. Armenia and Spain turn to the donkey, the familiar beast of burden. Tunisia and Morocco dispense with animals altogether and go straight to the human condition.

The punchline is essentially the same, as is the lesson.

Each culture seems to have reached into the world around it, looked at whatever animal happened to be standing there, and decided: yes, that one will do.

Maybe that is one of the more revealing things about language. We think of idioms as evidence of how differently cultures see the world, and sometimes they are. But just as often, they show how remarkably similar our observations are.

We waste good things on people who cannot appreciate them. We talk to people who are not listening. We offer something precious to someone who has no use for it. 

And we do much the same in modern life. We keep explaining ourselves to people who have already decided not to understand us. We pour time, attention and affection into places where they are not returned. The wisdom in these old proverbs may be less about knowing who is foolish and more about knowing where our own effort belongs. 

And sometimes the lesson is not to try harder, but to recognize when we are playing the qin to a cow.

Other articles in the series: Lost in translation? These proverbs never were | Pt.2 and Pt.3 

Editor's note: Zaruhi Poghosyan is a multimedia editor for CGTN Digital. This article is part of China, Soft Focus – a slow journalism series that offers human-centered glimpses into culture, history and everyday life across China through measured pace and intimate storytelling.