Comparative analysis and teaching of "youmei-meili" in Chinese and "ngodngam-suayngam" in Thai

Abstract

Near-Synonym teaching has always been a challenging aspect of international Chinese language instruction. Currently, there is rich research on the essence of Chinese near-synonyms; however, there are relatively few case studies on the error analysis of Thai learners in using near-synonyms. This article focuses on the written language data of students from a Thai art university, taking the pair "youmei-meili" (elegant-beautiful) as the target words for investigation. The study analyzes the similarities and differences of these words in Chinese, Thai, and in the comparison between Chinese and Thai. The aim is to design a suitable teaching approach and provide insightful ideas and methods for the instruction of Chinese near-synonym vocabulary.

Through the research, it was found that in Chinese, the scope of application of "meili " (beautiful) is broader than that of "youmei" (elegant). Although the categories of words they modify as attributive adjectives are somewhat similar, the specific collocations are different. In Thai, "youmei" corresponds to "ngodngam" and "meili" corresponds to "suayngam". Comparatively, "ngodngam" tends to describe more sophisticated things and is more commonly used in literary and artistic works, while "suayngam" is used more to describe commonplace worldly things. However, even among native Thai speakers, there are subtle differences in the specific collocations. In the Chinese-Thai comparison, the differences between "youmei-meili" far outweigh the similarities. These differences have an impact on learners' errors in usage.

Based on the comparative analysis mentioned above, the author proposes the following teaching methods for the near-synonym pair "youmei-meili": utilizing corpus-assisted teaching and Chinese-Thai semantic comparison. Using Lesson 8 of "Boya Chinese: Elementary Accelerated Volume 1" as the teaching material, the instruction is divided into four steps: 1) Introducing new vocabulary; 2) Guiding discovery; 3) Summarizing similarities and differences; 4) Reinforcing exercises.