Acquisition Of Chinese Euphemisms For Russian Learners

Euphemism ((?)) is a word or an expression without emotional color, which is usually used instead of a synonym with unpleasant or disrespectful meaning. Euphemisms play a great role in people’s life. Euphemisms can be used in a great variety of situations, mainly they help people to avoid saying some embarrassing or harsh things, but in Chinese culture euphemisms also gain another function:to make nice things or words sound even better and more polite. Although, nowadays euphemisms with the second type of function are being used less and less, they are still a common phenomenon.Through the use of questionnaires, this study set out to assess the extent of comprehension of Chinese euphemisms by Russian learners with an advanced level of Mandarin with the aim of finding, if any, the gaps in the studying Chinese euphemisms in the teaching of Mandarin in Russia.The study found that Russian learners of Mandarin had deficiencies in their comprehension of Chinese euphemisms and their usage indicating that the teaching of Mandarin to Russians needs to do more to make the learning of the language comprehensive.The body of this paper is presented in five parts:Chapter One includes the parts:the significance of the study topic, literature review, purpose of research and research methodology.In Chapter Two, the study compared and analyzed two dictionaries:“委婉语应用 辞典” ("The dictionary of Chinese euphemisms") and “(?) ” ("The dictionary of Russian euphemisms"), alongside with comparing the purposes, frequency and range of usage of euphemisms in Russian and Chinese; the difference between euphemisms of two languages stands for difficulty in learning Chinese for Russians. The study then selected 154 euphemisms which can possibly be used by Russian learners while communicating with Chinese native speakers from “委 婉语应用辞典” as the main language content of this paper.In Chapter Three, with the help of Chinese language corpus and the questionnaire of Chinese native speakers, the study did more selection work, choosing only euphemisms that appear in the corpus more than 50 times and also added some often spoken euphemisms instead of the synonyms usually used only in the written form.In Chapter Four the study presents results on the research it conducted on the extent of comprehension of Chinese euphemisms by Russian learners, using a questionnaire on Russian learners with advanced level of Chinese. Chapter Five:The study made some recommendations on improving teaching methods and resources while teaching Chinese euphemisms, based on our research results. This included the generation of some suggested euphemisms that can be added to the teaching of Mandarin.While doing our research we have discovered that in the Chinese language euphemism is a common, wide-spread and extensively used phenomenon. Russian learners have some acknowledgements about Chinese euphemisms, although, they use them not so often and not well enough. We made a list of Chinese euphemisms to be learned by Russian learners based on our research results, we listed 100 euphemisms to be added to the curriculum at the advanced level (this list doesn’t include the euphemisms which were mentioned in the questionnaire by Russian learners more than 15%). We hope that our research results will help to improve study materials so that Russian learners’ level of Chinese will also improve. We also hope that the editors of Chinese course books and dictionaries will add more euphemisms used by Chinese people in their everyday lives.