A contrastive study of color terms in Chinese and English [汉英颜色词的对比研究 ——以乌干达汉语学习者为例]

Abstract

With the advancement of globalization, communication between different languages has become increasingly frequent, and the relationship between language and culture has attracted growing attention. As one of the basic vocabulary categories, color terms not only describe the objective world but also carry rich cultural connotations and cognitive significance. This study takes Chinese and English color terms as the object of analysis and conducts a systematic comparison at the lexical, semantic and cultural-cognitive levels, while exploring its applications in teaching Chinese as a foreign language through empirical research. In terms of methodology, this study adopts literature review, comparative analysis, and empirical methods including questionnaires and corpus analysis to investigate the usage patterns of color terms and learner errors. The results show that Chinese and English color terms share certain commonalities at the lexical level but differ significantly in semantic extension and cultural symbolism. Chinese color terms tend to carry stronger cultural symbolism and fixed metaphorical meanings, whereas English color terms rely more heavily on specific contexts. Learners commonly exhibit negative transfer from their mother tongue, mainly manifested as semantic misunderstanding and pragmatic misuse. This study suggests that in teaching Chinese as a foreign language, more emphasis should be placed on cultural explanation of color terms, and a combination of contrastive and contextual teaching approaches should be adopted to enhance learners’ intercultural communicative competence. The findings not only deepen the understanding of the relationship between language and culture but also provide a reference for the practice of Chinese language teaching. Keywords: color terms; Chinese-English comparison; cultural differences; language cognition; teaching Chinese as a foreign language.