Analysis Of Chinese Phonetic Errors Of Native Belarusian Speakers

Language is an important instrument of communication;human beings can preserve and transmit knowledge with its help.In the process of communication,words play an important role of conveying concepts,grammatical rules put order in the sentence,but only phonetic forms can make our message meaningful.It is crucial for the second language learners to acquire phonetic rules of the target language.Belarussian learners of the Chinese language can come across many difficulties while acquiring Chinese as a second language.Most phonetic errors are caused by negative transfer from the mother tongue and by attempts to adjust phonetic features of one language to the other one.Twelve native Belarussian speakers as well as one speaker of Mandarin with standard pronunciation took part in our experiment.Belarussian speakers were divided into three groups according to their level of Chinese.In our research we conducted an error analysis in order to identify mistakes in consonants,vowels and tones made by Belarussian native speakers.The results of our research are listed as follow:1)Elementary and advanced learners of Mandarin use a Belarussian vowel[?]to substitute a Mandarin vowel-i[?],intermediate learners use a Mandarin vowele[?]for the same purpose.2)The native Belarussian speakers that reached an advanced level of Mandarin use a Belarussian vowel[?]to substitute a Mandarin vowel i[?],intermediate learners use a Mandarin vowele[?]for the same replacement.3)Elementary and advanced learners of Mandarin use a Belarussian letter-? which articulation is close to a Mandarin vowel u[y].4)Most native speakers of Belarussian use a Belarussian vowel[y]to replace a Mandarin nasal vowel uen[u(?)n].5)Belarussian native speakers substitute a Mandarin vowele[?]with another Mandarin vowel i[?].6)Intermediate learners replaced a Mandarin consonant b[p]with a Belarussian consonant[n],elementary and advanced speakers articulated a Mandarin consonant b[p]as a voiced consonant.7)Belarusian native speakers replaced a front nasal final with a back-nasal final.8)Mandarin learners use a diphthong ai[ai]to substitute a diphthong ei[ei].9)Intermediate learners replace a Mandarin consonant g[k]with a Belarussian consonant[?].10)Advanced learners use a front nasal final to substitute a back-nasal final.11)The second tone does not conform to the standard tone pitch and does not show a clear rising contour.Native Belarussian speakers articulate the third tone as the second one.The forth tone does not reach the standard tone pitch and does not reveal a clear falling contour.This research has a great value for learning Mandarin as a second language in Belarus.Previous works were mostly focused on English native speakers and speakers of Asian languages,and we cannot find any research related to the phonetic error analysis of Mandarin for native Belarussian speakers.We conducted the comparison of Mandarin and Belarussian phonetic systems and revealed phonetic errors in consonants,vowels and tones.