![]() I’m happy to say the “n” sound does exist in Chinese but…unfortunately, the “l” sound does not. There’s a subtlety to the differences between these English vowel sounds, even native speakers of English regularly mispronounce them. ![]() The “eh” sound is confused with an “ahe” sound. The “ih” sound is mixed up with and “ee” sound. The 2 common vowel sounds Chinese students most often confuse are the English “ih” and “eh” vowel sounds. ![]() More of that focused sound production is called for here, use every tool at your disposal to vanquish these foes. These 2 consonant sounds don’t exist in Chinese-are you picking up on a theme here? For some reason, it’s unusually difficult for Chinese ESL learners to form the “r” and “v” sounds. ![]() Learn the proper mechanics for producing the unfamiliar sounds, and create word lists and tongue twisters to practice aloud. These errors can be corrected with careful attention to English word pronunciation-by that, I mean TAKE YOUR TIME! Sound out the individual sounds within English words. These consonant clusters and final consonant sounds are all new for Chinese ESL students I’m not surprised their English pronunciation suffers from these sort of substitutions and omissions. Chinese students will pronounce English words ending in consonant sounds with either an “ah” or “eu” vowel sound at the end of the word, or they omit the final consonant sound entirely. Words ending in consonants are also hard to find in the Chinese language-except for those ending in “n” or “ng”. Or-students omit the sounds all together. Yeah, that’s right? = Question Consonant Clusters and Words Ending with ConsonantsĬonsonant cluster don’t exist in Chinese on top of these unfamiliar sounds, many consonant clusters in English contain the especially challenging “r” or “l” sounds- “tr”, “dr”, “pl”, “cl”, “fr”, “fl”, “pr”…Ĭhinese students of English often add vowel sounds between consonant clusters, and substitute consonant sounds that are easier for them to say. There’s no individual tone for a specific word rather, how your tone and pitch is used over the whole of a sentence changes its meaning and the emotion expressed.Ĭhinese ESL students’ ears are finely tuned to tone so learning proper English language intonation will be straight-forward once students understand the way intonation effects what’s being communicated. English, by comparison, uses an alphabetic writing system-consonants and vowels are used to create individual words, and English is an intonation language. Furthermore, Chinese is a tone language-your pitch can change the meaning of a word. Pronunciation Errors Common to Chinese ESL studentsĬhinese ESL students face several hurdles to proper English pronunciation but I’d like to focus on the top 5 common pronunciation errors -they are: tone and intonation consonant clusters and words ending in consonants “r”and ”v” sounds vowel confusion and “l” and “n” confusion.Ĭhinese uses a logographic system for its written language, this means that a character represents a word or phrase. The fact that English and Chinese share a similar word order and sentence structure only exacerbate this problem. The most common pronunciation errorsby Chinese ESL students can be traced to the students’ tendencies to translate to their native language. The languages, however, are another story. China and America have a few things in common in that they’re both large countries with a wide variety of dialects and a deep sense of patriotism.
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