A Study Of Metaphor Differences In Chinese And English Diet Idioms And Suggestions Of Teaching Chinese As A Foreign Lagnguage

Idiom is a special language phenomenon and the essence of the languagevocabulary.It is the result of long-term using and created out to the language form.Itreflects a nation’s history,geography,social attitudes,beliefs and lifestyles.Especiallydiet idioms,because diet is important to the survival of the human’s daily lifes.In this paper,the word “diet” which is relevant in the idioms mean “eat,bite,drink,swallow”and other ways of eating,including general staplefood,meals,snacks,wine, tea,soup,drinks,cooking terms,cookware and tast of food.First, we take the metaphoical expression of Chinese and English diet idioms as thestarting piont of the comparison.The source domain and semantic two aspects ofChinese and English diet idioms were compared.Second, based on the theory ofcultural linguistics, the causes of differrences are analyzed in Chinese and Englishculture perspective.Then based on the comparative in the above, we use the theory ofteaching Chinese as a forgeign language and the theory of cross-cultural comunicationto give some proper suggestion about teaching Chinese as a foreign language fromthree aspects：compare,communicative approach,contextual analysis of Chinese andEnglish diet idioms.Finally,this paper points out the content and viewpoint of researchwork and makes a brief summary and conclusion.