On The Phonetic Errors Made By Japanese Students In Their Acquisition Of The Chinese Language

China and Japan maintain innumerable ties with each other in history and geography. The history of the Japanese’s learning the language of Chinese could date back to the time prior to Sui and Tang Dynasties. As the basis of a language, pronunciation plays a key role in any language acquisition whose threshold is pronunciation. As much disparity exists between the pronunciation of Chinese and that of Japanese, students whose first language is Japanese are inevitably subject to the impact of their mother tongue while learning Chinese. Therefore, a study on the differences and similarities in pronunciation of the two languages is a must. A comparative analysis of such differences and similarities can help students find out their phonetic difficult and weak points. Then such difficult points are sort out and put into different categories, so that a way is figured out to better train student.The paper made a comparative study on the features of phoneme, syllable, tone of Chinese and Japanese. Followed by such comparison and contrast, the paper went on to seek the problems and difficulty that Japanese students encounter in their acquisition of the Chinese language. The comparison and contrast found that the Chinese language has the pronunciation that the Japanese pronunciation system does no t have. The Japanese students are more inclined to make phonetic errors in articulating aspirated sounds and un-aspirated sounds, front and back nasal sounds, four tones. A summary of regular patterns of phonetics and a comparative study can find ways to work out the above problems.The significance of the paper lies in giving better direction to teaching through comparison and contrast, analysis and summary of those phonetic errors made by Japanese students in their acquisition of the Chinese language. Only by grasping the regular patterns of phonetics of Japanese students in their Chinese acquisition can we effectively help them overcome their weak points so that they can develop more standard and fluent pronunciation while articulating Chinese.