Experiments And Contrastive Analysis Of Chinese Students' Interrogative Sentences In Japanese

Recently, Chinese is getting more and more popular and quite a lot of foreignstudents are starting to learn Chinese, which also promotes scholars’ further studyand research on Chinese and Chinese teaching. Lots of scholars focus on the study onChinese initials, Chinese finals and also the tones. And the results and excellentachievement from them have been applied successfully to Chinese teaching. As a keyand important point of phonetics teaching, the issue on intonation has drawn moreattentions in academic field. So far, there are few Chinese intonation researches donein experimental way, and the ones that for learners from Japan are not enough,neither. This thesis takes Japanese students who learn Chinese as the research targetand attempts to find out and then analyze the intonation problems of Japanese wholearn Chinese interrogative sentences, in terms of pitch range, the starting pitch andundulating scale. What’s more, comparison between Chinese and Japaneseintonation is made in this thesis to find out the reasons for the misunderstanding andmistake of Japanese students. At last, the author puts forward specific suggestionsbased on the research results to guide the Chinese intonation teaching. The thesisfalls into the following five parts：The first part is an introduction, which gives a definition of intonation firstly andthen also has an overview of research on Chinese intonation, Chinese interrogativeintonation, Japanese intonation and also Japanese interrogative intonation. The planfor this thesis is stated in this part.There is experiment designing and the related introduction in the second part.Questions such as experiment target, materials, methodology, experimental processand also the research elements are introduced in this part.The third part is mainly on the description and analysis of the intonationproblems of Japanese students when they learn Chinese interrogative sentences. Forinstance, comparing with Chinese native speakers, the pitch range of Japanesestudents is relatively narrow, which shows that there is less and smaller pitch changeof Japanese students’ pronunciation. In each of the eight groups referring in this thesis, different intonation features are presented due to the gender differences andthe Chinese language level differentiations.In the same way as the third part, the author does an analysis of Japaneseintonation, from the angles of pitch range, starting pitch and the undulating scale. Inaddition, comparison between Chinese and Japanese intonation has been made tofind out the learning rules, then to explain the reasons why Japanese makeintonation mistakes when they learn Chinese as what has been discussed in the lastchapter. Among all the results, there is one showing that the pitch in the end ofJapanese interrogative sentences is usually rather high, with a rising trend. Therefore,Japanese students raise the ending pitch naturally when they express Chineseinterrogative sentences. However, not every Chinese interrogative sentences endwith a very high pitch. That’s why there is usually a big difference between Chinesenative speakers’ and Japanese students’ interrogative intonation. Besides the highpitch of the ending part in a Japanese interrogative sentence, there is anotherobvious feather, that is, the pitch change in Japanese interrogative sentences is notas obvious as the Chinese ones. Therefore, when Japanese students learn Chinese,the full range of the sentence is rather narrow, which is quite different from theChinese native speakers’.A conclusion has been made in the fifth part. Based on the previouslydiscussed features and reasons, the author puts forward specific suggestions andteaching methods to assist Chinese intonation teaching.