A Tentative Exploration Of Cultural Impact On English And Chinese Expressions

With the advent of the access to the sophisticated science and technology, it is unanimously agreed upon this saying that the current world is one of the global villages and all the villagers may have far more chances to communicate with one another. To make the everyday communication a great success, we hold that it is far from enough to have a good command of language, instead the understanding of the culture, target culture in particular, is of paramount significance. It is undoubted that language is a part of culture and learning a language involves the acquisition of the cultural elements as various kinds of cultural values, concepts, notions, to name just a few, are fully embedded in the expressions or realizations of the language. Communication breakdowns may often be experience simply because of the inadequate understanding of the culture included in the language expressions, therefore it is no exaggeration to say to learn a language well, one should at the same time pay sufficient attention to the understanding of the culture. Therefore, it seems to be absolutely necessary for one to gain deep insight into the expressions or ways bearing the typical or different culture traits in the course of learning a language.The author of this paper wishes to share some understanding of the cultural expressions by comparing English with Chinese on the familiar topics like"color terms","taboo expressions","euphemisms"and"use of languages". It is hoped that this paper will shed light on the similarity, if there is any, as well as the differences in terms of the cultural concepts along with the expressions in language. Pedagogically speaking, this paper will be of great use in arousing the sense of the cultural diversity on the part of language learners while learning a language.