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From the point of view of linguistic evolution, speech is prior to writing. The writing system of any language is always “invented” by its users to record speech when the need arises. Statistics resulting from careful investigations show that there have been over 5,000 languages in the world, about two thirds of which have not had written form. Then in everyday communication, speech plays a greater role than writing in terms of the amount of information conveyed. Thirdly, speech is always the way in which every native speaker acquires his mother tongue, but writing is learned and taught later. For modern linguists, spoken language reveals more true features of human speech while written language is only the “revised” record of speech.
Language is first perceived through its sounds. Thus the study of sounds is of great importance in linguistics. Naturally, linguists are concerned with those sounds that are produced by humans through their speech organs and have a role to play in linguistic communication. The inpidual sounds within this range are the speech sounds.
Most works concerning the contrastive research of English and Chinese put much emphasis on semantics, syntax, grammar or even modes of thinking. While recollecting my experience, I find that pronunciation is the first obstacle I have ever encountered during the acquisition of the English language. Learning an language starts with the acquisition of pronunciation. English is a language branch belonging to the West Germanic line of the Indo-European family. Chinese belongs to the Sino-Tibetan language family. English is a intonation language, while Chinese is a tone language, thus comparative studies between the two languages in terms of intonation, tone, stress and rhythm are commonly seen, while studies concerning similarities and differences between the phonetic systems of the two languages are hardly found. Basically the previous studies of the contrastive study of English and Chinese were carried out under the theoretical framework of... And the theories are hard to be carried into concrete practice. This is one of the main reasons that I choose the topic: The Negative Transfer of Chinese on English Pronunciation - from the Phonological Perspective.
Also, exam-oriented education leads to Chinese EFL learners’ doing better in English writing and grammar than in talking. Mostly, Chinese EFL learners learn English to deal with written exams rather than to actually use it in daily life. So the systematic learning of English phonetics and phonology are ignored. While with the deepening of globalization, English has become a lingua franca, which means that English is nowadays an international language and the acquisition of the English language has become even more significant.
The most difficult to overcome during the acquisition of a language is accent. Japanese accent are frequently made mockery of, which sometimes appears confusing and misleading. However, Japanese accent does not pose a threat to native English speakers’ understanding what they are saying. which I found intriguing and curious. The same is with the case of Indian accent. And thus I would like to discuss the phenomenon and try to offer some suggestions.
Phonetics is defined as the study of the phonic medium of language; it is concerned with all the sounds that occur in the world’s language. Both phonetics and phonology are concerned with the same aspect of language -- the speech sounds. Phonetics sometimes are concluded in the scope of phonology, like in A New Concise Course in Linguistics for Students of English, compiled by Dai Weidong and He Zhaoxiong, in which phonetics and phonology are in a unit titled Phonology. This paper illustrates the distinctions of the English and Chinese phonetic systems from the perspective of phonology (phonetics included). The phonetic transcriptions used in this paper are in accordance with the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA).