📖 Meaning
This idiom means that something is extremely difficult to accomplish, going far beyond ordinary difficulty. The emphatic structure conveys that the difficulty is so great as to be almost insurmountable. It is used to stress how hard a task or situation truly is.
📜 Origin Story
The phrase employs a classical Chinese rhetorical pattern in which the particle 乎 (hū) serves as an emphatic infix and 其 (qí) reinforces the repetition of the same adjective, yielding the construction X-乎-其-X to mean 'extremely X'. This pattern appears in various classical and literary texts and is analogous to formations such as 微乎其微 ('exceedingly tiny') and 神乎其神 ('marvelously mysterious'). No single canonical source is recorded for 难乎其难 specifically; it is a later literary elaboration built on this well-established grammatical template. It is most often encountered in written and formal contexts.
💡 Example Usage
要在三天内完成这项工程，真是难乎其难。
Completing this project within three days is truly next to impossible.
🏷️ Category
➕ Similar Idioms
➖ Opposite Idioms
🔤 Quick Facts
- Chinese: 难乎其难
- Pinyin: nán hū qí nán
- Literal Translation: difficult, indeed, its, difficult
- Category: Condition
- Characters: 4