Week 8, Part 2: Chinese & Pronunciation

For those who have followed my blog since the beginning, this blog topic may seem familiar. In my Week 3, Part 2 post, I enumerated some characteristics of Mandarin Chinese and English that may contribute to the typical Chinese accent. However, those were merely observations made by me and an ESL teacher. After doing more in-depth research on accents and pronunciation, I came across more professional information published by British linguists Michael Swan and Bernard Smith.

English has more vowel contrasts than Chinese does, so as a result, Chinese ELLs may have trouble distinguishing between certain vowel sounds. Here are some examples:

• The difference between /i:/ (heat) and /ɪ/ (hit) has no equivalent in Chinese; therefore, ELLs may confuse words with those phonemes.

• Similarly, the problem persists with /u:/ (fool) and /ʊ/ (full)

Like with South Asian languages, some vowel sounds are completely non-existent in Chinese:

• While /æ/ (cat) is prevalent in English, it doesn't exist in Chinese, so many people may confuse it with other vowel sounds

• Likewise, /ɒ/ (hot) is everywhere in English, but doesn't exist in Chinese.

• While /ʌ/ (cup) doesn't exist in Chinese, it is often replaced with /a/ which is similar to a Chinese phoneme.

The book also enumerates differences in consonant phonemes, most of which I have touched on in the other post, but it also specifies some region-specific problems with speakers of not Mandarin, but Chinese dialects:

• Many Chinese dialects don't have /n/, so it might be difficult to distinguish between /l/ and /n/. (light vs. night)

• For some southern Chinese ELLs, it's difficult to distinguish between /r/ and /l/, so sometimes rice sounds more like lice.

• As with South Asian languages, words ending with consonant sounds are often suffixed with an extraneous vowel sound. (wife vs. wif-ah)

Sometimes in English, we used reduced syllables, which shortens some words to make them easier to say while talking casually. In Chinese, this is significantly less common, so Chinese ELLs tend to stress too many syllables while speaking English. For example, when we say fish and chips, it often comes out more like fish 'n chips, while Chinese ELLs may stress the and. As with South Asian ELLs, intonation in phrases and sentences is often hard to pick up and can only be fully understood with a lot of attention to detail while listening to native speakers.