Some Issues Related To Vietnamese Students’ Study Of Sinological Symmetric Four-word Idioms

Idiom is the fixed combination of words with writing nuance, fixed structure andcomplete sense. Chinese idiom is the quintessence of the treasure of Chinese vocabularies,which carry diverse cultural connotations. For the foreigners who study Chinese, idiom isalways the most challenged aspect and students from Vietnam are not exceptions. To beable to facilitate the study of Chinese, especially Chinese idioms, I have conducted asurvey on Chinese symmetric four-word idioms.Based on the purpose of my research, I selected524Chinese symmetric four-wordidioms from the book “Wanyong chengyu cidian” of the Sichuan publisher to study.Through analysis and statistics, this kind of idiom is classified into8categories ofstructures and6categories of meanings. All the four-word idioms, which are classifiedinto before and after parts, or homologous grammatical structure, or contrastable or similarmeanings, are belonging to the kind of symmetric idiom. In general, grammatical structureof symmetric idiom is the conjugate structure which means the before and after parts haveparallel structures.For Vietnamese students who study Chinese, mastering grammatical structures andmeanings of symmetric four-words idioms not only enhances the reading and speakingability but also gives great advantage in improving the capability of translating fromChinese into Vietnamese and vice versa; in addition, this could helps to avoid mistakescaused by the lack of understanding of cultural connotations of the term, dependence onthe words, etc. Also, in this dissertation, I suggested some study methodologies andapplication of Chinese idioms.In summary, symmetric four-words idiom is an important part of Chinese. Masteringthis kind of idioms plays a critical role in studying Chinese.