Figures of speech are manifested in all aspects of the five communicative skills of listening, speaking, reading, writing and translating in international Chinese education. Based on the interlanguage theory, this paper adopts the bias analysis approach, quantitative and qualitative research methods, as well as interview methods, and takes the classification of rhetorical figures in Chinese Rhetoric (3rd edition) by Wang Xijie (2014) as the main reference. Through the sorting and statistics of the corpus of students majoring in international Chinese education at the middle and high levels, this paper analyzes the acquisition of balanced, focused, varied and associative figures of speech by intermediate and advanced Chinese learners and their aesthetic errors, and explores the cultural and linguistic roots underlying these errors. It is found that students’ evaluation of the acquisition effect of the four types of speech figures is as follows: emphasis > balance > association > change, and there are disparities in the acquisition of each figure of speech within each class. Students frequently interpret the rhetorical devices in the target language based on their own cultural aesthetics, which results in the imbalance of the language structure, the lack of sentence focus, the deficiency of exaggeration, the overlapping use of figurative words, and the indistinct emotional color of borrowed pronouns. Finally, this paper proposes several teaching strategies to enhance the rhetorical ability of international students and reduce misunderstandings in crosscultural communication.