A Contrastive Analysis Of Chinese Phonetics Of Russian, Japanese And Korean Students

Chinese is a tonal language while Russian, Japanese, and Korean are non-tone languages. Therefore, in the process of learning Chinese tones, oversea students from Russia, South Korea and Japan have difficulty learning Chinese tones, which leads to foreign accent phenomenon. Thus, this thesis tried to use the experimental phonetics research method, and took Russian, Japanese, South Korean foreign students of elementary Chinese level as the research objects, using experimental voice software-Nankai university Mini Speech Lab to contrastive analyze the tones of Chinese monosyllable and disyllable among the students from these three countries. In this paper, the study found that the primary Chinese level oversea students had many similar biased errors in both monosyllables and disyllables. For example, in monosyllables, the pitch of the Yinping tones were not high enough; the Yangping tones were prone to misreading, and easily confused with Shangsheng tones; the pronunciation of Shangsheng tones were not accurate, and there were great individual differences. In the aspect of disyllables, influenced by monosyllables’biased errors, tone values and tone patterns of disyllables also generated a lot of errors, the errors between monosyllables and disyllables were close; when students linked the Shangsheng tones, there was no change of tones in Shangsheng tones of the former word. In terms of the causes of biased errors, the three countries of international students had many similarities:the influence of the negative transfer of mother tongue, the influence of physical and acoustic features of the pronunciation in Chinese tones, and the influence of abstraction of tone teaching.This study regarded the phonetic teaching as the starting point of the research, and studied the tones which scholars avoided and foreign students could not master well as the research object, using contrast analysis to quantify and concretize different foreign students’Chinese tones. this paper will provide some practical helps for weak Chinese phonetic teaching as foreign language.