like ship and sheep. Furthermore, Chinese has three phonemes similar to /p/, /t/, and /k/, that are slightly aspirated. When pronouncing these phonemes in English, they appear to be closer to the English phonemes /b/, /d/, and /g/. This is because the time that it takes after releasing air and before the next vowel sound is much shorter that an English native speaker.
Some languages use long and short vowels to change the semantics of a word. The Chinese language does not use long and short vowels in this way (Yin and Zhang, 2009). The sound /i/ is present in Chinese, but the sound can be short or long without changing a word’s meaning. This sound often gets substituted for the English sounds /i/ and /i:/. This can be a source of frustration
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English is a stress timed language, meaning syllables take differing amounts of time to pronounce depending upon the stress used. In addition, stressed syllables always take more time to pronounce than nonstressed syllables. Chinese, on the other hand, is a syllable timed language. This means that rhythm depends entirely upon the number of syllables to be spoken, where each syllable requires the same amount of time to speak as every other syllable. This is a factor that influences Chinese speakers’ accents. A Chinese learner of English will likely speak English as if it is a syllable timed language, giving equal stress and timings to each syllable. Yin and Zhang (2009) explain that there may be misunderstandings in communication between Chinese and English speakers due to this …show more content…
It has already been well documented that listening is a critical skill in language learning. Depending upon the local dialect of the student, particular English language sounds are more difficult, or easy to perceive (Yin & Zhang, 2009). One of the perception difficulties in students from Yunnan province is distinguishing between the English sounds /ae/ and /e/. An example of English words with these sounds are ‘bad’ and ‘bed’. Students in Sichuan province often have problems with the /n/ and /l/ sounds. Examples of these sounds are ‘life’ and ‘knife’.
Luk & Shirai sum up first language interference well, stating that it is learning to ignore language features that are not present in L1 which, though makes learning L2 difficult and frustrating, increases the efficiency and competence that an individual will have in their L1.
Linguists have identified up to six vowels Chicagoans are pronouncing in non-standard ways. But those vowels in BAT, BOT, and BUT are, McCarthy says, the big three” (qtd, in Minnoff.)
In "The Meaning of a Word" and "Being a Chink", Gloria Naylor and Christine Leong examine words of hatred that are meant to scorn, hurt and disgrace people. But these same words could also be used without harmful intentions and in a fashion of endearment amongst the people those words were created for. They each had a different word to discriminate their different culture and ethnicity. These writers discuss the words "nigger" and "chink", which are words in our language mostly ignorant people use. Naylor and Leong are also both minorities who were raised in America. They talk about how discrimination and hatred towards minorities is almost always inevitable in America, which is mostly populated by Caucasians. Naylor and Leong observe how these racial acts of discrimination can unify a group of people even closer together. Naylor didn't know the true meaning of the hate word nigger until it was used against her in a degrading manner. On the other hand Leong already knew what chink meant but wasn't traumatized until she found out her father discovered it.
Growing up in the American education system, I always took my education for granted. My mother would always say, “You know how much people would want to be in your place and go to school?” In Chinese culture, education is the only way to achieve upward social mobility and leave the poor social economic class; whether you are rich or poor, you must have education and go to school. Education is not equal for everyone so how can one play the game when it is set up against you. Education is based on the resources that are offered in the area, thus if you live in a poor area, you get fewer resources. When the One Child policy was passed, it helped because all the family’s resources are focused on one child but the child is the only one to take care
From the 80s in the last Century, there has been some movements promoting “proper Cantonese pronunciation,” or PCP in short, backed by various scholars and media. The idea of “proper pronunciation” comes from pronunciations that are commonly heard in daily usage which are deemed as either wrong or unclear by archaic standards. The wrong pronunciations often refers to mispronunciation such as pronouncing 爍 (soek3) as 礫 (lik1), which largely associates with characters with similar structure. While for unclear pronunciations it refers to “lazy pronunciation“ (懶音) which people mistakenly use or fail to pronounce correctly due to the speed of speech.
There are some cultures that are similar in terms of geographical region and as more in similarities than differences. For example, by historical influence, Latin American countries share culture between them and also with Spain, as well as Europeans who share certain cultural, tastes in food, manners and customs, because some countries had influences of past kingdoms and conquests. It can be said that no culture is like the Chinese culture, neither in language, customs, or personality; the Chinese culture is so unique that is a whole world to know. Chinese cuisine is adapted to the climate and the characteristics of the geographical area, meaning that Chinese food cannot be eaten the same or in the same way as in other countries. In fact, it is said that the tasting of traditional Chinese recipes in their home is a
Unlike English, the Japanese language uses a phonetic system, so in tanka and waka, where there are syllabic constraints, space must be used as wisely as possi...
In the book, American Born Chinese, there are multiple plot elements. Conflict, Parallel plots, Foreshadowing, Flashback, Exposition, and Inciting incident. Three plot elements I’ve noticed in American Born Chinese is Conflict in the story about the Monkey King, Flashback in the Jin Wang’s story, and foreshadowing in Danny Lee’s story. A conflict is the part of the plot where the rising action starts and when the conflict ends the falling action begins. A flashback is a literacy device that helps us understand a character past or in this case their parents past. Foreshadowing is event in a story’s exposition that gives you an idea what will happen in the future.
She then mentioned a case study of Temiar (Mon-Khmer, Malaysia) that he had a highly contemplated example of epenthetic vowel situation in elongated consonant groups. Temiar permits just CV and CVC syllables. They are provided with an onset of three or four consonants, Temiar embeds epenthetic vowels to shape a thread of open syllables ended by a closed syllable. The epenthetic vowel is considered as a schwa in open syllables and [e] in closed syllables. The nature of an epenthetic vowel might be resolved in one of two ways: it is either a settled, default quality which may, obviously, be liable to standard allophonic variety as per the dialect's phonology; otherwise the quality is dictated by some piece of the phonological setting.
The proper use of pronunciation is what helps a message be understood easily by other fluent English speakers. Often times, an ELL student can struggle with forming a word correctly and may cause a word to be pronounced as a different, but similarly sounding word. One example of how the pronunciation of a word can cause a message to be unclear a Spanish speaker pronouncing “kitchen” as “chicken”. These two words are very close in sound, but each word has a completely different meaning. A mother that asks a child to “please clean the kitchen” greatly differs from the mispronounced word that has changed the sentence to “please clean the chicken”. There are many speech therapy courses that are offered in schools that will improve a child’s ability to speak productively. In the oral language speech by ELL student Tania, the Spanish student faces challenges while pronouncing “stories about magic, vampires “. These impediments can be worked on and improved over time. The grading scale of pronunciation on a rubric can range from insufficient in the result of being virtually unintelligent; to excellent, being that it pleasantly uses intonation and pronunciation as accurately as a native speaker
These three groups were then asked to complete three different tasks. The first was to repeat and segment 20 different words (5 consonant-vowel-consonant, 5 CCVC, 5 CVCC, and 5 CCVCC) and two overall scores were administered to the participants. Both scores were out of a maximum of 20 points; the first score was based on giving 1 point for each correctly analyzed word, and the second score was based on giving 1 point for correctly analyzing medial vowels.
The United States and China are two very large countries that have cultures that are well known throughout the world. There are many differences between the United States and China, but there are many contributing factors that shape the cultures of these two countries. Language is universal, but there are different meanings and sounds, which vary from one culture to another. In China, citizens speak many languages, but about 94% speak the Chinese language. The difference in dialects was overcome by the written word and eventually a version of Mandrin became the “official speech” (The Cambridge Illustrated History of China, 1996, p.304).
I smelled different. I wasn’t allowed to shave my legs, I attended Chinese School for ten years, and my favorite meal consisted of a warm barbecue flavored pork atop a bowl of white rice.
New languages are always overwhelming.English is difficult language to learn, especially if it isn’t practiced often. The english language includes rules that can be frustrating to get a grip of. Many International students face the fear of not being understood or not pronouncing something correct...
Experiencing those days where people would laugh at other for the broken English; the grammar and pronunciation are the toughest parts of the language. People with English as a second language always stumble upon difficulties; however, the determination of learning a new language do not decrease easily as the motivation is still surrounding one’s mind. Today, English has become an international communication; even the teaching and learning of the language has already spread throughout the world. English is known as one of the most common use language and has been offering classes everywhere for years especially around Asia; additionally, the world common language has now become the number one language uses in every fields of career that is being offer everywhere. Non-American students should be required to take English class as a second language in school
Hence, the overall goal of this study is to investigate the Hasawi plosive phonemes and how they shape different allophones. This paper is divided into five main sections: the first section is an introduction of the topic including an overview of the dialect; the second section is a review of the literature which includes brief previous related studies; the methodology used for this study is described in the third section; the fourth section demonstrates the findings of this study; and finally the conclusion.