Abstract: Metaphor is a basic mode for human beings to understand the objective world. When different languages understand or talk about the same thing, they often face the choice of different cognitive models. This paper takes the usage of Japanese “nagare” and “nagareru” as an example, and tries to analyze the differences between Japanese and Chinese in the conceptualization of nouns from the perspectives of “the scope of metaphor” and “the depth of metaphor”. The study finds that although Chinese can also use fluid metaphor or to metaphorically represent nouns such as “time”, this thinking mode is a basic cognitive mode in Japanese, so abstract nouns such as “politics”, “story”, “competition” and “silence” in Japanese are based on fluid metaphor. Through the contrastive study between Japanese and Chinese, we can see that it is a remarkable feature that Japanese differs from Chinese to think about objective things by means of fluid metaphor.

Key words: Japanese-Chinese comparison, the scope of metaphor, the depth of metaphor, fluid metaphor