Comparison Of English,Chinese And Japanese Pronunciation And Its Implication

In recent years, communication between China and western countries as well as Japan has been increasing rapidly. Spoken language as the main medium of communication plays a significant role during the process of communication. Pronunciation is in which people speak, thus it decides the effect of communication directly. As a result, it is crucial to master correct English and Japanese pronunciation. Cross-linguistic comparison as one of the basic methods for linguistic research, if it is utilized in phonological comparative study, it will certainly have both theoretical and practical significance. However, in China, except the comparative studies on English and Chinese phonology, not enough work has been done so far in bilingual phonological comparison between other foreign languages and Chinese. Let alone, trilingual phonological comparison, say, among English. Chinese and Japanese. In view of this situation, this dissertation is to make a phonological comparison of English, Chinese and Japanese pronunciation, and try to find the similarities and dissimilarities among languages so that it will be of help to master phonological features of different languages. It also expose the problems that Chinese students have in the pronunciation of the third language(L3) by comparing that of their first language(Ll): Chinese and the second language(L2): English, and explain the problems by applying the transfer theory as well. This dissertation is written in hope to provide some theoretical insight as well as some practical ways in teaching and learning of the pronunciations of foreign languages, especially of Japanese as a third language.This dissertation consists five parts:In the introductory chapter, some remarks are made about the contrastive analysis, the need for the phonological comparison of the three languages, an overview of the three languages and the comparing methods used in this dissertation. In Chapter one, a comparison of the segmental and suprasegmental features of thesounds of English, Chinese and Japanese has been made and dissimilarities among the three languages are brought out.In this chapter, comparison has been made for vowels, consonants, syllables, stress, tones and accents of the three languages at the phonological level. The comparison results imply the necessity to learn pronunciation by comparison. In Chapter two, the case study of comparing the Japanese pronunciation Chinese students with the Chinese and English pronunciation reveals the influence of L1-Chinese and L2-English on Chinese students' learning of L3-Japanese at the phonological level. This inspires us to notice the transfer among languages. The third chapter draws on the transfer theory to explain the influence of L1 and L2 on the pronunciation of L3 presented in the former chapter. It also discusses how to improve L3's pronunciation by exploiting the transfer theory.It is hoped that the study endeavored here is of some value in both linguistic theory and methodology.