In the actual idioms teaching, most students feel that idioms are difficult to comprehend, memorize and make actual application just because the overall meanings of idioms are unpredictable. Since cognitive linguistics is based on embodiment, it can change the abstract things into comparatively concrete things, which provides a shortest way to grasp these idioms. Actually, most idioms are based on conceptual metaphor and metonymy composed of conceptual mappings between the source domain and the target one. Therefore, this paper is trying to probe into the role of cognitive principles in idioms teaching, especially animal idioms from the contrastive analysis on Chinese ＂hu＂ idioms and English ＂lion＂ idioms.
