Research On Difficulties In Learning Chinese Initials And Vowels Among Elementary Level Chinese Learners From Europe And The United States

As we know,the importance of pronunciation is self-evident,it is the physical material of language.But compared with the grammar and vocabulary,pronunciation is difficult to express,not as intuitive as the vocabulary and grammar.Therefore,early studies usually based on listening,and with the development of modern science and technology,more and more measuring equipments and softwares which analysis of the voice provide the basis for the current study.For beginners of Chinese learners,learning the speech itself is full of challenges,and people have different language backgrounds faces different part of speech difficulties.This paper combines the actual research and the need of application,with the method of experimental phonetics,keep eight international students who come from Europe and the United States and are in the primary level of learning Chinese as the object of study,through the classification of the problems appeared in the collected corpus,makes a comparative study on affricate initials j[(?)]?q[(?)]?zh[(?)]?ch[(?)]?z[ts]?c[ts'],fricative initial x[(?)],vowels u[u]?u[y]?e[(?)]?er[(?)],double vowels uo[uo]?ou[ou]?ue[ye]?iou[iou]?uei[uei]and rhinolalia vowels[yen]?uen[(?)]?in[in]?ing[(?)]systematically,measuring the VOT values of initials and the minimum frequency and drawing the vowel formant pattern and voice traverse chart to conclude the common characteristics and regulations related to pronunciation in the early study of Chinese speech for European and American students,which offers the acoustics parameters in the further study and at the same time provides references of approaches to settle the native accent problem in the process of teaching Chinese as a foreign language.Firstly,in this stage,the author arranged the subjects had reading and listening test,and then through the strict hearing,summarized the subjects,problems in Chinese consonants,vowels and syllables.Then use Praat voice software to analyze these pronunciation problems compared with the control group by category,thus summed up the difficulties of the European and American students in primary level of learning Chinese tone.In addition,compared with usual talk,when input the samples,the reading is more formal,the reader's monitoring consciousness of control tend to increase and the sound was more nervous,sometimes deliberately pronunciation can be found.They hope their sound can be more close to standard Mandarin,so sometimes then even overcorrected.In addition,for the same sample,different speakers have different performance.This paper try to eliminate some personal factors,and find out the common characteristics of their pronunciation,or carry on the analysis on different pronunciation,trying to reflect the students' difficulty in learning Chinese tone and show the basic features of their voices.Secondly,the essay for the first time uses the learning difficulties from language experiments of Nanjing University foreign students oral Chinese inter-language corpus,and testifies them one by one in order to prove the universality of those difficulties.In this stage,the author chooses the corpus from Primary Oral Chinese Test of Nanjing University final examination and focuses on the research of the pronunciations of 2006 effective Chinese syllable from ten European and American foreign students.The author classifies the relevant pronunciations according to the difficulties summarized by the language experiments,and lets every language project which will be studied have at least 30 samples.Then he analyzes the language samples which are chosen in order to testify the universality of the result of language test beyond.The shortcoming of this essay is that the coverage of language projects for research is not enough.Because of the restrict of time and energy,the author just chooses some fault or nearly-fault language units to analyze,including seven Chinese consonants,14 Chinese vowels and some pronunciations of syllables.Besides,the description of the differences between the pronunciations of consonants and vowels from experimental group and those from control groups is quite rough.Through the above phonetic experiments and the text corpus,the following conclusions are drawn:In terms of initials,the phenomenon of confusion between each two affricate initials are inclined to be generated,such as z[ts]and zh[(?)]tend to produce the sound of j[(?)].In addition,Chinese pronunciation zh[tg]?ch[(?)]?j[(?)]?q[(?)]bear strong similarities with the English pronunciation[(?)]?[d3].Under the influence of the native language,the initials of the affricates has become the most difficult part to learn.The affricate initial x[(?)]is pronounced incorrectly both in reading words and the flow of the language,because its pronunciation is similar to sh[s],or more like/(?)/in English.In terms of vowels,not only in reading words,but in the flow of the language,students are easily to pronounce the u[u]with tongue forward distinctly,and the pronunciation tends to be u[y].When the single vowel u[y]is spelled with j[(?)]?q[(?)]?x[(?)],students' pronunciations are more similar to their pronunciations of u[u].The overall performances for compound vowels' pronunciations are lacking in stroke with head vowel too short,sound flat,so words are read like this.While in the flow of the language,due to the influence of the syllables fore-and-aft,the problem of lacking of stroke is much clearer.In terms of spelling initial-finals,the conclusion of phonetic experiment shows that the rule of spelling is very hard to grasp,and the Chinese spelling is also not be applied skillfully and timely.It is wrong for students to stiffly pronounce with spelling initial-finals,such as zhi,chi,shi,zi,ci,si;meanwhile,they could not spell correctly in which the initial-finals should be spelled.