A Contrastive Study Of Chinese And English And Taste - Related Words And Their Application In Teaching Chinese As A Foreign Language

Language is the carrier of culture and reflects culture. Words with rich culturalconnotations are the building materials of a language. They are the most activeelements in Chinese language. For English-Speaking learners, learning words is themost important and difficult part in teaching Chinese as a second language, becausethese words have great differences with their native culture. Taste phrases are thevery special and important parts in Chinese vocabulary system. Sense of taste is thevisceral reactions when humans approach the world. Chinese and English both havethe words which describe taste, but they have different cultural significance. Thispaper takes “sour, sweet, bitter, hot, salty, fragrant and stinky” as examples andcompares the similarities and differences of these Chinese and English wordsthrough semantic system，word一formation and metaphorical cognition. In thispaper, I am going to focus on the words on taste, Choosing the common used tasteperceptual words of the Chinese and English as the research object, through thecomparison of the commonly used taste perceptual word formation, and cognitivesemantics between the two languages, I can not only narrow my study but also fanout from one point to area. In this paper, these words are divided into two parts, oneis “sour, sweet, bitter and hot”, another one is “fragrant and stinky”. The former canbe perceived through mouth, the latter can be perceived through nose, This kind ofwriting method can make the paper look more layered and make the foreignstudents’ interest in learning Chinese. It aims at giving the foreign learners morecommon knowledge about Chinese culture.this paper made a systematically comparative study on the taste perceptualwords of the Chinese and English, then it analyses the difference and reasons fromthe geographical location, religious belief, customs and values. In short, we can notonly deepen our understanding on the features of the taste words of the twolanguages but also get to know more on the culture.The aims of second language teaching is to practice significance on thecross-cu1Lural communication, This paper also applies the corresponding teachingsuggestions on the students whose mother tongue is English.