Main Difficulties And Teaching Methods Of Italian Learners Of Basic Chinese Pronunciation

Due to the increasing improvement of China’s international status and its rapid economic development, more and more Italian people decide to study Chinese language at college. Together with the passion for the language itself, a strong interest in the field of Chinese education and culture has been recently emerging. Given this situation, it is believed that the number of students learning Chinese in Italy will constantly increase in the future.In 2014, thanks to the opportunity which was offered by the Italian University of Bergamo, the author of this thesis had the chance to attend the Chinese lessons of a Chinese elementary-level class for 4 months at University of Bergamo.Starting from the internship practice, this thesis aims at examining and presenting the difficulties experienced by Italian students when learning Chinese phonetics. As a matter of fact, since Italian and Chinese phonetic systems have huge differences, Italian students are not comfortable when learning and reproducing Chinese phonetic elements. This obviously produces recurrent patterns of mistakes which, nevertheless, have not been taken into account by the actually scarce literature dealing with theories of error analysis. What we are still lacking is therefore a set of consistent comparative studies on Chinese and Italian language.In order to try to fill this gap, it is important to consider, understand and analyze the difficulties Italian students undergo at the initial stage of their learning process.To reach the afore mentioned aim, the thesis is divided into four sections.The first chapter presents previous studies on this subject, including both Italian and Chinese scholars’ papers. The second chapter reports the results of the case study, describing and analyzing students’ errors in their phonetic dictations.The third chapter of this work describes the difficulties encountered by Italian students in learning Chinese phonetic elements. Particular attention is paid to initials, finals, tone and Pinyin transcription. This is the most important section of the thesis because the comparative analysis of Italian and Chinese phonetic systems allows, on the one hand, to find out the main differences between them and, on the other hand, to understand the reasons why Italians make these precise mistakes when speaking Chinese.The fourth chapter has its core centre in the exposition of the teaching strategies adopted in the field of Chinese phonetics.In the end, the brief conclusion express innovations and limitations of the thesis, also suggesting after reading research proposals.