An Error Study On Chinese Tones Of Hebrew Native Speakers

This dissertation investigates and analyzes the errors of Chinese tones of Hebrew native speakers by the auditory and acoustic experiments.There were three groups of Israeli students included in this experiment,including elementary level group,intermediate level group and advanced level group.The dissertation consists of five chapters.The first chapter illustrates the reasons and significance of this research,summarizes previous studies around this topic and introducing the research objects,materials,tools and study methods.The second chapter shows the results of the experiments by the graphs and forms.The errors of the elementary group are as follows: the first tone is too low and takes for much longer time than native speakers;the second tone is like fall-rise tone and the pitch of the fall part is much lower than the standard;the third tone has the correct tend of pitch contour,but the pitch of fall part is too low,while the pitch of the last point is too high;the fourth tone has correct trend but the pitch of the first point is much lower than native speakers.The errors of the intermediate group are as follows: the first tone is very low;the second tone is like fall-rise tone,the pitch of the fall part is too low and holds for longer time than native speakers;the third tone has the correct trend of pitch contours,but the pitch of the beginning point is a little bit lower,while the pitch of the final point is too high;the fourth tone is similar with native speakers except the high pitch of the last point.The errors of the advanced group could be summarized as: the pitch of the first tone is a little bit lower than the native speakers;the second tone also sounds like the third tone;the third tone is quite similar with native speakers except the pitch of the first point is a little lower;the fourth tone is almost same with the standard.In the third chapter,the errors of the three groups are compared.We found that all the three groups have the same problem with the first tone which is the area of pitch is lower than native speakers,but it goes higher following the levels.All the second tones sound like the third one,the pitch of the first point is lower than native speaker but also increasing following the levels.All pitch contours of the third tone go at the correct trend,while the pitch of the first point of the elementary group is much lower than the standard,the intermediate group get better and the advanced one is the best.The pitch of the first point of the fourth tone of the elementary group is lower than the standard,and the pitch of the last point of the intermediate group is higher than the native speakers.The advanced one get best.The fourth chapter mainly introduce the teaching strategies.On the basic of errors,we come up with teaching strategies for Israeli students.Firstly,the teaching suggestions are given according to the errors we get by the experiments.Then some teaching strategies are given according to my teaching experience with the steps of learning tones.The fifth chapter is conclusion.Summarize the main conclusions of the study,point out deficiencies of this study.