A Comparative Study Of Chinese And Vietnamese Idioms

Idioms are words using as a habit in people’s daily life, which are much used in spoken form and have fixed structures. Idioms are rich in content, they are created simply by ordinary people in their life and labor, therefore they have the characteristics of popular and plain. The content of idioms is expressedclose to the old people’s life, but also contains the China Vietnam ethnic folklores, thoughts, psychological and other deep cultural factors. This paper takes the Chinese and Vietnamese idioms as the object of study, based on previous researches and existing literature, and through researching the literature and data comparison method, it explores the cutural and psycological reasons of the similarities and differences of and the reasons of Han and Yue people.Through the combing many language scholars’ views on idioms, this paper summarizes the definition and features of idioms. It put a clear frame of definition ofVietnamese idioms, from which it compares the similarities and differences between the concept of Vietnamese and Chinese idioms. Secondly, this paper compares the basic characteristics of Chinese and Vietnamese idioms, and discuss in three aspects of idioms:structural characteristics, syntactic functions and semantic features, from which founds out great differences of the basic characteristics between Chinese and Vietnamese idioms such as syllable structures, grammar structure characteristics. In addition, by using the cultural linguistics and cognitive linguistics as the theoretical base of the study, the paper compares the cultural connotation of Chinese and Vietnamese idioms which content mainly reflected by animal images, cuisine and social phenomenon. Because Chinese Vietnamese idioms are mainly based on popular activities in our daily life, they are familiar to people’s lives. Therefore, Chinese Vietnamese idioms not only reflect people’s way of life, but also reflects the laborer’s thoughts, values and national mentality. From similarities and differences reflected in cultural connotation of Chinese and Vietnamese idioms, the paper attempts to reveal the cognitive and psychological factors that affect those differences.