A Study On How German Native Speakers Perceive The Time Orientation Of Chinese "?/?"

In my teaching practice in Confucius Institute at the University of Vienna,I found that the German native speakers have an error in perceiving the time orientation of Chinese space words "?/?".The most typical error is that they will regard "??" as the day after tomorrow,a temporal word pointing to the future.Instead,they will perceive"??"mistakenly as the day before yesterday and as a temporal word pointing to the past.This shows that faced with the time orientation of space words "?/? " German native speakers adopt a different perspective as Chinese native speaker do.After interviewing the students who have the erro bias,I found that:first of all,they believe that what is in front of them is the future,and what is behind them is the past.From their cognition,it is not difficult to find that they use space orientation to deduce the orientation of time.Time and space have always been the two basic factors of human's life.Throughout history people have dedicated so much to investigate the relationships between the two factors.The concepts of time and space are indeed inseparable.The concept of time is more abstract than the concept of space.Because time is in no specific forms,people cannot perceive it through tangible feelings.People then tend to perceive time,mainly depending on its projection on spatial structure.Such systematic mapping from a specific cognitive domain to an abstract cognitive domain can be explained by metaphor theory.In metaphor research,metaphor is regarded as a cognitive tool,which is the very basic in the process of thinking.The relationship between time and space is like that time is characterized by the concept of space.That is to say,time is the metaphor of space and spatiotemporal metaphor is a one-way mapping from the spatial domain to the time domain.Clark(1973)originally proposed the "time moving" metaphor and the "ego moving" metaphor.In addition,it is not difficult to find that German native speakers have adopted the metaphorical perspective of "ego moving" for cognition.In this perspective,time is modeled as a road on which the observer marches towards the future.The "?" is considered to be in front of the observer's eyes and is about to face it,indicating the future.However,there is another metaphorical perspective which is called the "time moving" metaphor.When people use this perspective to recognize,time is regarded as a river flowing to the past,or a conveyor belt moving in this direction.All events are moving from the future to the past,and the events are sorted on the timeline according to the time of its occurrence.Through interviews,I also found that the reason why they did not choose to use "time moving" perspective is that they believe that it is more convenient to use the"ego moving" perspective to regard an observer as a reference substance than to findanother reference to recognize,that is,they tend to recognize from a simple metaphorical perspective.In addition,according to a comparative study of time orientation in the vocabulary form of "forward/backward" in German and Chinese expression,it is found that the prefix "ruck-" which means behind in German can only indicate the past in time orientation.To a certain extent,this may make them accept the use that what behind them is the past,and conversely inferring that what in front of them is the future.In order to study whether German native speakers prefer to use the "ego moving"perspective to recognize the time orientation of the space words "?/?" in Chinese or not,I designed an experiment by randomly distributing an equal number of test questions in"ego moving"and "time moving" metaphor of "?/?" vocabulary,the correctness of the test questions are analyzed by SPSS data,and it is concluded that German native speakers have a cognitive bias of the "ego moving" perspective.However,there are still some participants,and some participants who did not use the spatial orientation to infer time orientation do not have this cognitive bias.According to interviews and questions on the test,we can know that these participants were subject to the influence of the word "vor(-)"representing "front".According to the conclusion in Chapter 3,the German word or prefix"vor(-)" corresponds exactly to the spatial meaning of "front" in Chinese,and "vor"basically points to the past in time According to the interview,it can be seen that their temporal understanding of "vor" also points to the past.Based on this,I assumed that if the participants realize this correspondence,they will do much better in answering the time orientation of the test in "time moving" groups.I designed another experiment,using the same experimental materials as the above experiments,using SPSS to analyze the correctness of the test questions.Through descriptive statistics,we found that after realizing this correspondence,the correct rate of answering the "time moving" group questions was very high,and the correct rate of "ego moving" answers was very low;the independent sample t test shows that the average correct rates of the two sets of questions are significantly different,which means that the certain correspondence between Chinese and German "front" and "vor" is conducive to the correct answer.Based on the mapping relationship between spatio-temporal metaphors and the experimental results of two experiments,this article puts forward relevant teaching suggestions:In teaching involving Chinese "?/?" time orientation,teachers should be alert to the ego moving cognitive bias of German native speakers.To help students better understand the time orientation of the space words "?/?",teachers could give a corresponding explanation with "vor-" or"vor" in German,or could also help by drawing marks.