The Comparison Of Figures Of Speech In Modern Chinese And Thai Languages

Nowadays, there are a great numbers of Thai people studying Chinese language and its trend is increasing. The Chinese language becomes the top choice the Thai students opt to study, rather than English. The Ministry of Education decided to mark the Chinese language as the number one foriegn language, emphasizing the important of Chinese language towards the education system in Thailand. Moreover, we can find the Chinese teachings in many secondary schools. At the same time, both Government and Private Universities also have the Chinese language in their curriculum, by hiring the native Chinese lecturers as a team.Eventhough the Chinese and Thai languages are in the same language family, Sino-Tibetan with a lot of similarities, the learning of Chinese language beginning from the basic is not easy, especially for the figure of speech. We found that the research on the figure of speech is quite rare, contrary to the researches on alphabets, grammars and phonetics. The figure of speech is quite a new thing and cause difficulties for teaching and studying nonetheless.The figure of speech is the method of communication that we cannot overlook. It is not only an easy way to communicate but there are more meanings behind it. There are a lot of figures of speech in Chinese and Thai languages both for speaking and writing. However, the Chinese language learners in Thailand seem not to really understand the figures of speech in Chinese language. It is because the figures of speech in Chinese and Thai languages have both sameness and differences which may cause a difficulty for the usage and selection of words. This research paper named "The Comparison of Figures of Speech in Modern Chinese and Thai Languages" and the main contents divided into2elements. The first element focused on the analysis on types of figures of speech in Chinese and Thai languages by choosing the total of60examples to analyze on their meaning, classification and usage, as well as summarize the sameness and differences on classification of figures of speech in both languages.The second element aims to analyze the36examples of figures of speech in both languages on the sameness and differences in usage as well as finding out the reasons of the sameness and differences by focusing on the cultures, thougts and societies, etc.This research aims to help the Chinese language learners in Thailand, and Thai language learners and researchers in China to understand the similarities and differences of figures of speech in both languages in order to have a better understandings on the differences of cultures and beliefs for both countries and elaborate the communication understanding for both languages.