Analysis Of Chinese Idiom With Color Lexicons And It’s Pedagogical Application In Teaching Chinese To Speakers Of Other Languages

Color lexicons are essential components in any language. All the languages spoken in the world have its set of basic color lexicon. The majority of the world’s languages will include these basic color lexicons:"black, white, red, yellow, green, blue green, blue, purple and pink, brown, orange". In China, color lexicons existed from the dawn of the Chinese writing system. Carved on the oracle bones some3500years ago, we can identify characters representing;"black, white, vermillion, red, umber, yellow, green, blue, green and indigo". In the earliest existing collection of Chinese poems and songs “诗经”-The Odes (The book of Songs) in it includes in abundance the descriptive usage of color lexicons. Many types of Chinese decorative art use series of richly saturated color in bright complementary pair, it reflects the esthetic elements in Chinese culture. The importance of colors appeared not only in folk art and Chinese philosophy and folklore beliefs, but also in writing of colorful Chinese idioms. Chinese color words are often used in describing people, scenery or even human emotions, and in many occasions as anecdote of historical events. The examples of subtitle meaning of color lexicons in Idioms can be seen in The Odes (The book of Songs); collected since the Zhou dynasty the four characters form use many color words to describing love, beautiful scenery or people dressed in colorful garment. From The Book of Odes one can easily trace the origin of Chinese Idioms.Traditional method in teaching foreigners the Chinese idioms is based on the principles in language education of the heritage learner. Its primary function is in teaching the ethical behavior and literary tradition. The problem of such an approach to the foreign learners is that while study of Chinese idioms present already great difficulties for the foreign learners:because not only the students lack the proficiency in listening, but also the necessary background knowledge in Chinese culture in order to understand the idiom’s cultural references. By recognizing the importance of Chinese Idioms for the heritages learner, I am proposing here the collection of color idioms for the foreign learners of Chinese language. The collection of144Chinese color idioms includes20color lexicons; its main objective is to teach second language learners on-First: Recognition of Chinese characters and the other characters in color idioms. Second:Reading the idioms (sound memorization) with the correct tonal arrangements. Third:Respond to the idioms (listening) by understanding its meaning. Lastly, the learner should acquire the ability in using these idioms for writing and in their daily conversations. With repetitions of color lexicons appeared in the idioms it can accelerate the learner’s memorization process. By organizing characters according to the stroke order and radical groups, we can help students in writing complex characters with ease. The design basics of The Chinese Scrabble Board, the color idioms、text book and characters chart and workbooks can all be based on the Idiom’s color coding system, and its structure (in four characters). The forms of a4characters sentence and its regularity in the tonal arrangements can help the learners to memorize the characters better and the assist in its tonal correctness. For all the above reason, I recommend the color idioms in this book as a good learning material as a beginner’s level textbook for curriculum of teaching Chinese idioms to the second language learner.