More on how the Chinese view dragons

I mentioned in my last post that Chinese people see dragons as benevolent and magical creatures who bring good luck. I forgot to provide two illustrations of this mindset. The first is that a common given male name is "dragon." For example, the Chinese name of the famous Hong Kong action filmstar, Jackie Chan, is 成龙. The first character is a rising tone Cheng, which is a common Chinese family name--in China, the family name comes before the given name--while the second character, of course, is dragon, or a rising tone "long." The second illustration is a four word set idiomatic expression. The Chinese call these phrases 成语: the second character is a falling/rising tone "yu", and appears as the second character in the Mandarin words for most foreign languages, like German (德语, the first character is a rising tone "de"), French (法语, the first character is a falling/rising tone "fa"), etc. This "chengyu" is 望子成龙, or "may all your children become dragons". The first character is a falling tone "wang," the second is a fall/rising tone "zi", and you already know what the third and fourth characters are.