Abstract
Language consists of vocabulary, and the most important part of any language system is vocabulary. Phonetics and grammar are merely the pronunciation of words and their specific use. If phonetics and grammar are emphasized at the expense of vocabulary, learners will still not be able to express themselves well. The Chinese language itself is open and rich. Teaching vocabulary at the basic level is not as difficult as teaching phonetics and grammar and can therefore be easily neglected. Learners have many problems in learning vocabulary, and the biggest difficulty is recognizing synonyms. Teaching synonyms has always been an important and difficult problem that teachers focus their attention on, especially when teaching Chinese as a foreign language. Although ontology, the teaching of synonyms, has become more and more sophisticated, it cannot meet the current needs of teaching. There are many ways to distinguish synonyms, and the article distinguishes them under three aspects: rational meaning, emotional color, stylistic color and lexicality.