A Research On Japanese Students’Hierarchy Of Difficulty In Acquiring Chinese Tones

Foreigners have difficulty in acquiring Chinese tones, and the Japanese are no exception. Over the years, scholars who studied Japanese acquisition of Chinese tones have attached great importance to their errors in monosyllable words and bi-syllable words; by means of listening and writing, scholars discovered that the mixture of the second and third tone was big problem for Japanese learners. What’s more, they also came up with some reasons that led to Japanese errors, such as Japanese has a lower pitch range than Chinese, unlike Chinese tones, Japanese accents put little emphasis on differentiating between meanings, and there are problems in textbooks or teaching methods.Based on previous researches and findings, this paper combined Transfer Theory and Error Analysis Theory, but also took the law of "listening prevails speaking" into consideration, trying to investigate the errors and the causes when Japanese acquire Chinese tones in the respect of dialects. The previous studies, which tried to find out how Japanese language influenced Japanese people acquiring Chinese tones, took for granted that all Japanese examinees speak standard Japanese---the language that originates from Kanto dialect. However, there are various dialects in Japanese, such as Kansai dialect, which served as standard Japanese long before and is still widely used. Kanto dialect is fairly flat, while Kansai dialect is undulated and seems close to Chinese tones, so this paper assumed that people from Kansai area have advantage over Kanto speakers in acquiring Chinese tones, based on the Transfer Theory. Nonetheless, whether the advantage exists and how significant it can be are uncertain, because Japanese accent has little function of differentiating meanings. Thus, the two uncertainties are what this paper tried to assure.This paper surveyed40Japanese students from all over Japan, and asked them to complete a series of tasks, including pronunciation test, a listening test and a questionnaire about Chinese tones learning. First, they read out16monosyllable words,20bi-syllable words and18tri-syllable words; then they dictated the tones of the words they above; at last they answered the questionnaire. By recording and analyzing their sounds through recorder and Praat, the examinees’tone pictures and values came out, and so as how good their Chinese tone pronunciations were. Comparing their pictures and values with those of Chinese people, it became clear that all of them had greatest difficulty in the second tone of two-compound monosyllable, first tone+fourth tone and "Putonghua", while the first tone of one-compound monosyllable, first tone+first tone and "Chuzuche" were easiest. To analyze in the same way the11students’pronunciation respectively from Kanto and Kansai, it can be known that to those from Kanto, they felt the fourth tone of nasal monosyllable, second tone+first tone and "Tushuguan" the most difficult to pronounce, and the first tone of two-compound monosyllable, fourth tone+first tone and "Weishenme" the easiest. To the11people from Kansai area, the hardest were the third tone of one-compound monosyllable, second tone+first tone and "Xinglixiang", and the easiest were the first tone of one-compound monosyllable, first tone+first tone, and "Jiayouzhan". The results showed that the difficulties for Kanto people and Kansai people were different, and the amount of errors of Kansai people was lower than that of Kanto people in the regard of monosyllable words, bi-syllable words and tri-syllable words (21.8:26.6、91.6:94.2、131.9:131.2). The results also showed that Kansai speakers did better than Kanto people in hearing Chinese tones, but this kind of advantage decreased with the number of syllable increasing, and they had the same level in listening tri-syllable tones. Therefore, this paper concluded that the Kansai dialect benefited Kansai people when they acquire Chinese tones.This paper not only found what the difficult and easy Chinese tones were to Japanese to pronounce and hear, but also put the tones in orders and into hierarchies, so as to analogize other situations. The way was first listening to two people from Kanto and Kansai respectively reading a Japanese article, then dictating their Japanese accent, in which way the difficulties of the alike Chinese tones can be predicted. After that, it used Praat to get detailed values, so the real scales of difficulty came out. By contrasting the predictions and the results from Praat, it showed that the sole prediction was not that accurate.Dialects affect the ability of hearing Chinese tones, and this hearing ability also affects the acquisition of Chinese tones; therefore, Japanese from different places may have different difficulties in Chinese tones. Besides dialects and hearing abilities, some objective reasons lead to tonal errors. In the questionnaires, it can be known that the reasons included teaching in the classroom, textbook, and the characteristics of learners. Perhaps the conclusion and the hierarchies in the paper can be applied to Chinese teaching, such as compiling localized textbooks that put Japanese dialects and Chinese tones together. Teachers referring to the conclusion and the hierarchies of this paper may get good understanding of the difficulties their students may encounter, so they lecture and practice certain Chinese tones more attentively. Students who know the hierarchies of difficulty can practice the Chinese tones they are not good at pronouncing and hearing.