Phonetic Contrast And Learning Strategies Of Chinese And Thai

As both China and Thailand have tremendous advancement in economy and culture, the number of Thailand students in learning Chinese increase rapidly. Due to this, the difficulty in learning Chinese which face by most of the Thailand students increase as well. Phonetic is one of the important parts in learning second language, it is the foundation and also the key in learning second language. Therefore, how to focus in the teaching of phonetic is an important topic. Chinese and Thailand language are from the tone of phonetic but initial, vowel and tone are distinction to each other. Chinese language’s complement tone in initial will only appear before vowel as complement tone. So, one phoneme only appears one complement tone. However, in Thailand language, complement tone in initial can appear in front of vowel as well as becoming nasal consonant. Moreover, Thailand language’s initial itself has tone within, where the same phoneme will appear few complement tones. In the Chinese language’s vowel except the zero initials, others only appear behind initials. Nevertheless, Thailand language’s vowel can appear anywhere with short sound and long sound.Thailand students who are learning difficult Chinese language phonetic is mainly occur in two places. The first one is complement tone in initial such as zh, sh, r, z, c. Forty-two Thailand language’s complement tones in initials does not exist such tones. Therefore, such tones are unfamiliar and very difficult to learn for Thailand students. Second, vowel such as ii [y]、ei [e]、ie [i]are not exist in Thailand vowel. Thailand students when learning this vowel feel unfamiliar and always pronounce it incorrectly. Plus, not only students’ pronunciation, even lecturer facing some problems for example, some Chinese language lecturer pronunciation is not clear. Other problems are influence from native language, class hour lesser and not enough learning time. This thesis introduce characteristic of Thai-Chinese language phonetic system and compare both of the distinct phonetic system. In addition, to voice up some suggestions and ideas for the problems occur in Thailand Chinese language teaching in phonetic.