Abstract: Directional complement is a difficult point for teaching Chinese as a foreign language in Thailand. Thai students oftenmake mistakes in using directional complement in spoken and written Chinese. This article mainly discusses the positional relationshipbetween directional complement and object after a verb in modern Chinese and Thai. It first systematically analyzes the directionalcomplement in Chinese and Thai from the perspective of iconicity theory, then makes a contrastive study on the similarities and typicaldifferences between directional complement in Chinese and that in Thai, so as to facilitate Thai students' understanding of its form intwo languages.