A Study Of Idioms Learning In Boya Chinese (Flying Books 1&2)

International students take great interest in Chinese idioms thanks to their unique cultural connotations.However,the more complexity of such idioms than ordinary ones makes them an obstacle for these students.In other words,the teaching of Chinese idioms has remained a difficult point in the teaching of Chinese as a foreign language.It is for this reason that this paper is targeted at the 152 idioms extracted from the textbook Boya Chinese(Flying Books 1&2).An ontological study of these idioms is carried out from the perspectives of meaning,structure and function.Semantic study of these idioms indicates that,while the actual meaning of most idioms is consistent with their literal meaning,those with deep meanings different from superficial meanings pose challenges to teaching.In terms of structure,the number of joint-structured idioms is the largest,the rest being subject-predicate and modifying-modified.From the angle of syntactic function,the number of idioms that can serve as predicate is the largest,most of which are predicate joint structures.At the same time,questionnaires are conducted to investigate the status quo of international students using Chinese idioms by collecting and analyzing effective errors from international students.It is found that the errors can be grouped into four types,i.e.misuse of characters in an idiom,errors on account of semantic understanding,errors in the use of syntax and errors in pragmatic processing.The misuse of characters takes the form of mistakes in coining or changing idioms at will.Semantically,international students have a good command of idioms when the deep meaning is consistent with the superficial meaning,but the accuracy of idioms with similar meanings is less than 20%.In terms of function,students tend to get confused with noun and verb idioms.In terms of pragmatics,idioms are often used in inappropriate contexts and their emotions are often neglected.Then,according to the questionnaire and interviews,main causes of the errors are analyzed: the characteristics of idioms,negative transfer of target language knowledge,students’ learning and teachers’ teaching.Finally,based on the ontological study of Chinese idioms and the analysis of errors made by international students,some suggestions are given in the four aspects of idioms writing,semantics,syntax and pragmatics.It is hoped that these suggestions can be of some help to both students and teachers of Chinese as a foreign language.