Contrast Of Chinese-English Idioms And Strategies Of Teaching Chinese Idioms As A Foreign Language

The long-course cultural collision and communication between China and English have hadinfluence on the language development. Idiom is a very special phenomenon of language andwidely used in written and spoken language. Idiom, comes from people’s life, is specialidiomatic set phrases with stabile structure and complete meaning. There is a closerelationship between Chinese and English idioms, which are deeply rooted in both languagesin terms of structure form and cultural connotation, The effective use of idioms can bringconvenience for people’s communication; however, improper usage will lead tocommunication barriers.Idiom teaching is an essential part of teaching Chinese as a foreign language. This paper,based on the theory of contrastive linguistics, discusses English and Chinese idioms’characteristics and the reasons for their formation. Through the contrastive analysis it is tofind out the differences of structural and cultural connotation between the Chinese andEnglish idioms, helping students to reduce errors in collocation, better understanding thecultural connotation of Chinese idioms, and then, giving some suggestions for Chinese as aforeign language.This paper is divided into six parts:The first part reviews the research achievements and development in Chinese and Englishidiom contrast. The contrastive study of Chinese and English idioms began in the70-80’s oflast century, and has made fruitful achievements in the mid-late1990s. After entering thiscentury, Chinese fever has been sweeping the globe and contrastive study of Chinese andEnglish idioms has appeared a small climax.The second part defines the concepts of Chinese and English idioms, and introduces theirfeatures and origins. By contrasting the differences between Chinese and English idioms, thepaper finds that their differences affect the definitions and characteristics of idioms of the twonations; the two nations’ different histories, geographies, living environments and life styleslead to the diversity and inconsistency of Chinese and English idioms sources.The third part contrasts the structures of Chinese idioms with English ones. Chinese andEnglish idioms are fixed in the structure. Chinese idioms have six main structures, such assubject-predicate structure, coordinate structure, while English idioms mainly include five kinds of structures, eg: noun structure, verb structure; Chinese idioms are mainly formed byfour-character phrases while English idioms are not fixed in number of words; the correlationbetween words in English idioms is often expressed explicitly, while the correlation betweenwords in Chinese idioms is often expressed implicitly.The fourth part contrasts the cultural connotation of Chinese idioms with that of Englishones. It makes contrast from three aspects: social life, ethnic customs and religious belief. Insocial life, Chinese idioms present the characteristics of land culture and farming culture,while English idioms characteristics of marine culture and the fishing culture; in ethniccustoms, the different customs of the two nations have formed the different cultural cognitionin understanding the cultural connotation of idioms; in religious belief, the Han nationalityon the Buddhism and Taoism faith basis and the British people dominated by the Christianfaith lay the different religious marks on their own idiomsBased on the above analyses, the fifth part gives some suggestions for teaching Chineseidioms as a foreign language. The first suggestion for teaching Chinese idioms is to focus onthe structural contrast of idioms between Chinese and English; the second one is to payattention to the cultural contrast of idioms.The final part summarizes the main points of the paper，points out insufficiencies and offersinsights into future research...