Contrastive Analysis And Teaching Of Animal Images In Chinese And Russian Idioms

Idiom is a combination of words that has a figurative meaning owing to its common usage. An idiom’s figurative meaning is separate from the literal meaning. There are thousands of idioms and they occur frequently in all languages.Most of Chinese idioms are composed by four hieroglyphs. Chinese "成语" is translated into Russian as фразеологизм, идиома. Idiom as form is a huge part of the language vocabulary. It has a fixed structure and argument, expressed in the statement.Large part of idioms came from ancient times, including myths and legends, fables, historical allusions, but also the works of ancient writers, as well as from the folk idiom, the choice of words is often different from the modern Chinese.In the course of history, the animal is human’s the most ancient and probably eternal friend. People have spent thousands of years in contact with animals, creating a rich vocabulary and a vivid metaphor language.Chinese language has many symbolic meanings about animals, proverbs, and even some wonderful Russian proverbs as well are similar in usage!In addition, this is one, and the most striking sign, that has become a cultural connotation of Chinese language and culture, which is our background about the countless thousands of years, an endless "Zodiac". It has an important position in Chinese culture. However, animals of Chinese Zodiac are also very common in Russian proverbs.This article is about Chinese idioms with animals of Chinese Zodiac as the research object, and animals of Chinese Zodiac in Russian culture and idioms. The reference to animal idioms in a foreign language teaching aspect will be also given.