Animal Metaphor Teaching Strategies In Teaching Chinese As A Foreign Language

Metaphor is a unique cognitive style which based on the brain associating capabilities.It helps us deepen our understanding ofnew things by grasping the characteristics of thethings we already knew. By comparing the similarity between them, building connection to produce mapping, and through self-reproduction, it helps us to know the world. Metaphor is extremely attractive and philosophical. It widely exists in the language of every national culture and has its own system.Metaphor is a common cognitive style, but under the influence of different national cultural, differences appear. In Chinese as a foreign language teaching, we can easily find problems caused by metaphor differences. Some teachers choose to avoid such problems, and someforce students to accept them, neither of the results are optimistic.The former can’t reach the purpose of language learning, and the latter can neither solve the problem norunderstand the culture better, so the loss outweighs the gain. Because of the mapping we are familiar with, we can try to let students know the way and thinking produced by Chinese cultural metaphor in teaching Chinese as a foreign languageso as to understand the hard parts and grasp Chinese culture.The relationship between human and animals is verydeep connected.This paper chooses the metaphorsabout "human" and "animal" to explain the reasonswhy animal metaphors produce and the revelation for teaching Chinese as a foreign language. Selecting English idioms and Chinese idioms related to animals, this paper aims to analyse the whole concept and how the metaphors work. The differences between human and animals arethe precondition that human produce metaphorson animals, and the similarities of the two are necessary mapping conditions to link the two concepts.This paper based on the study of the metaphor theory in contemporary cognitive linguistics. From the metaphorical concept, mapping way and working mechanism, this paper analysesthe similarities and differences of metaphorical meanings and cultural differences in English and Chinese animal idioms, thus search a new way through metaphor to complete Chinese as a foreign language teaching.