Research On The Acquisition Of Mandarin Tones In Monosyllabic For Learners From Croatia

Phonetic is the material shell of language,the external form of speech,the external form of verbal expression.For Chinese learners whose mother tongue is not tonal language,phonetic is the first difficulty in learning Chinese,and tones is even more difficult.Tones errors run through the whole process of Chinese learning for Chinese learners.Learners from different language backgrounds show different errors in the process of tones learning.In early 2004,the Chinese language major was introduced as an elective at the University of Zagreb in Croatia.The Confucius Institute at University of Zagreb was officially inaugurated in 2012.Chinese language education in Croatia has been developing for nearly 20 years,but currently there is no research on tones errors among Croatian Chinese learners in China.Therefore,this study was conducted by using the opportunity of teaching at the Confucius Institute in Croatia.Based on the theory of Interlanguage,Contrastive Analysis and Error Analysis,this study analyzes the monosyllabic tones errors of 20 Chinese learners of the Confucius Institute at the University of Zagreb in Croatia,from the perspective of perception and production through tones listening test and pronunciation test,combining traditional phonetics with experimental phonetics,and explores the correlation between perception and production.On this basis,the characteristics and types of monosyllabic tones errors of Croatian Chinese learners are summarized,the causes of errors are explored,and teaching suggestions are put forward to address the causes of errors.The results show that:1.Croatian Chinese learners have successfully established the tones category in perception,but not in production.2.In the listening test,T2 is the most difficult to distinguish,T3 is the easiest to distinguish and “T2→T3” is the major error type of tones perception.In terms of traditional pronunciation experiments,the most prone to errors is T3,“T3→T2” is the major error type and it is easy to confuse T1 and T2.While in the acoustic experiment,T2 is the most difficult for learners to pronounce accurately.3.The perception and production of Croatian learners’ monosyllabic tones acquisition are not positively correlated,and the order of acquisition should be discussed specifically in terms of tones categories.4.Croatian Chinese learners at different levels show different characteristics of errors,and the errors rate does not decrease entirely with the improvement of their Chinese proficiency,intermediate learners may experience a “regression” phenomenon.Based on the above research results,the causes of monosyllabic tone errors of Croatian Chinese learners are analyzed from five aspects: negative transfer of mother tongue,negative transfer of target language,degree of emphasis,teacher strategies and individual learner factors.Five teaching suggestions are proposed: focus on developing tonal awareness,visual aid for tonal teaching,teaching tones according to different categories,diversified practice methods,teaching tones throughout.