Errors In Pronouncing Chinese Apical Sounds (zh,ch,sh,r) By Kazakhstan Students

The primary medium of language is sound without which the linguistic signs are rootless.It comes naturally that learning any languages starts with the sound of that language,and teaching a language such as Chinese as a a foreign language is no exception.This research firstly analyzed the errors of apical sounds committed by Kazakhstan Chinese learners which were sorted out from the recorded corpus.Feeding the pronunciation data of the experimental group and the control group into the voice software Praat,this thesis mapped out the the broadband language spectrum which proved the error types in terms of their acoustic characteristics.This thesis found that when the Kazakhstan student pronounced the apical sounds,they generally made the zh [t(?)] for a j or a j-like sound,the ch[t(?)’] for a q or a q-like sound,the sh [(?)] for a ch [t(?)’] or a ch [t(?)’]-like sound,and the r [(?)] for a retroflex sound with the tip of the tongue flapped similar to a trill.The students also tended to pronounce the apical sounds for the alveopalatal sounds,confuse the aspirated sounds with unaspirated sounds,and over-pronounce the r[(?)] sound.This thesis held that the errors the Kazakhstan Chinese learners made were probably the results of the negative transfer of their mother tongue,the over-generalization of the knowledge in learning the target language,and the teaching factors.In light the error types in this research,it finally put forward related teaching teaching suggestions.