Study of difficulty of Mandarin Chinese speakers in producing English

Introduction

This article presents and makes some analysis about the distinct phonetic problems of Standard Mandarin Chinese speakers in speaking Standard Australian English with a test sentence’ Lecturers think strange xylophones are on view at the museum’， Based on the difference of these two languages， the article first makes some hypotheses regarding the problems before moving on to the analysis of the problems. And the data obtained is from ten Mandarin Chinese speakers in China.

Brief introduction of Mandarin Chinese

The language under investigation is Mandarin Chinese. Mandarin Chinese， also called Northern Chinese， Chinese Kuan-hua， or （Pinyin） Guanhua （“Official Language”） the most widely spoken form of Chinese. Mandarin Chinese is spoken across most of northern and southwestern China and is the native language of two-thirds of the population. And Standard Mandarin functions as the official national standard spoken language of the People’s Republic of China.

Mandarin uses four tones to distinguish words or syllables that have the same series of consonants and vowels but different meaning and it has few words ending with a consonant. Mandarin， like all other varieties of Chinese， has mostly monosyllabic words and word elements， and， because there are neither markers for inflection nor markers to indicate parts of speech， but it has a fixed word order.

Method

In order to obtain the data， I first sent the test sentence to ten of my friends in China， whose first language are all Mandarin Chinese. All of them were non-English major students but learned English when they were in middle school and university. After they read the sentence， they saved their audio copies and sent them back to me. Based on their copies I identified five most common problems. The table below reports the details.

Hypotheses

Before I identified the problems， by comparing mandarin and English， I made some hypotheses for the variant pronunciations. First， the lack of dental sound in mandarin might make the dental sound like [θ] and [e] become difficult for Chinese speakers to pronounce. Second， since Chinese monosyllabic， it is difficult to distinguish the stresses in a polysyllabic English word. Third， as in Chinese， the phoneme /t/ always appears at the start of a word， it is not easy for the Chinese to pronounce [t] correctly. Fourth， when people speak mandarin， they pronounce the words separately， so， maybe it is difficult for the Chinese to add linking and intrusive when they read English. Fifth， few finals of consonants in pinyin make it more likely for mandarin speakers to add a vowel sound.

In the first type ‘phonetic realization’ I generally find four difficulties the speakers have when they read the sentence. All of them pronounced the unvoiced interdental fricative [θ] as the unvoiced alveolar fricative [s] and the voiced interdental fricative[]as the voiced alveolar fricative [z]. The voiced labiodental fricative [v] and the voiced labial velar glide [w] are of the same case. These three mistakes the speakers made are not special but normal problems the Chinese have when they read English. The reason I think is that in Mandarin Chinese there is no such sounds like [θ]， []， [v]. So it is very difficult for the Chinese to pronounce them correctly. When the need to pronounce the three sounds， they spontaneously choose the other three， which are easier and more familiar to them. The case of the other sound group [η] and [n] is somewhat different， for in Standard Mandarin Chinese people distinguish the two consonants. The reason why the speakers I selected didn’t pronounced [η] is that in Chongqing dialect people don’t distinguish these two sounds， and they pronounce [n] instead of the voiced velar nasals. So， when they read [η] in English， they virtually pay no attention to it.

In the second type ‘stress’ we can see that some of the speakers had problem with the words which are of two syllables or more when they read the sentence. It seems that they had no idea of the primary-stressed， secondary-stressed or unstressed syllables. Those difficulties are also common among Chinese people， for as we know， the Chinese language is monosyllabic and there is no stress in individual words. So， I think this is why it’s not easy for the Chinese to pronounce the polysyllabic words， which have stresses， correctly. When they read such words， they may simply and spontaneously put the primary stress on the first syllable.

The third type is about ‘phonology’. From the table we can see that some speakers mispronounced [t] as [th]. In the Mandarin Chinese spelling system， pinyin， the term ‘shengmu’ is just like the consonant in English and the term ‘yunmu’ is almost like the vowel. And in Mandarin， ‘shengmu’ is always put at the start of a word. So， the phoneme /t/ is generally only pronounced as [th]. Moreover， as in Mandarin Chinese， a word is consisted with one ‘shengmu’ and one ‘yunmu’， the construction of #（C）（C）_ is not allowable in Chinese. So I think Chinese people normally do not have such a sense of the changes in sounds like that. From this， I just predict that it is also difficult for the Chinese to pronounce [p] and [k]， for example， when they read the word like ‘speak’ and ‘school’.

The fourth type is ‘linking and intrusive’. I presume that is an obstacle for most Chinese people in their study of English. Mandarin Chinese is monosyllabic and when people speak Chinese， they pronounce the words separately. There is no linking and intrusive between two isolate words. So， the Chinese never have a concept of these two terms and they never use that when they talk. With this convention， Chinese people are not so used to using linking and intrusive when they speak English.

The last type is ‘phonotactics’. Phonotactics is a branch of phonology that deals with restrictions in a language on the permissible combinations of phonemes. Phonotactics defines permissible syllable structure， consonant clusters， and vowel sequences by means of phonotactical constraints. Phonotactic constraints are language specific （Crystal， 2003）.

The difficulty found there is another typical problem the Chinese people are faced with. As Mandarin has few words ending with a consonant， people are apt to add a vowel at the end of a word if the word ends with a consonant. The most common vowel to be added， based on my records， is [].

Conclusion

With the data I obtained， I found that based on the difference of the two languages， there are many difficulties for the Chinese people to pronounce English correctly. The convention of the first language of the speaker interfere the accuracy. This article highlights five distinct problems which lie in phonetic realization， phonotactics， stress， phonology， linking and intrusive. But as the data is limited， it is not so accurate. More accurate findings are more likely to be produced by large data and corpus.

References：

[1]Crystal，D.（2003）.“17：The Sound System”，The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language.Cambridge：Cambridge University Press.

[2]Fromkin，Victoria，Rodman，Robert，Hyams，Nina，Collins，Peter and Amberber，Mengistu.（2005）.An introduction to lanaguage.Fifth edition.Southbank，Vic.：Thomson.Ch.6 Phonetics：the sounds of language.Pp.208-237.

【作者簡介】唐弢，重慶第二師范學院。