Experimental Study On Russian Students’ First Class Vowels Of Mandarin Acquisition

Previous studies on the Chinese phonetics studied by Russian students mainly focus on the tones and consonants of mandarin,while the study on the acquisition of vowels in mandarin is basically vacant.In addition,most previous researches on the acquisition of mandarin pronunciation by Russian students were based on traditional phonetics.However,now the research method relying on oral and aural experience can no longer meet the increasing demand for intensive phonetic research.In this paper,we use the means of experimental phonetics to extract the process and results of the acquisition of mandarin vowels by Russian students.At the same time,combining with the theory of vowel pattern,we propose corresponding teaching strategies and suggestions for teaching Chinese as a foreign language.The main part of this paper takes the speech experiment as a foothold,and we put forward the following opinions: the pattern frames of vowels of Russian students and Chinese students are broadly similar shape,that means the gap between vertex vowels and standard pronunciation is smaller.However,there are later and lower overall trends of the tongue of the vowel [y] and the pronunciation sounds of all students are very unstable.Besides,the pronounciations of vowels [?] [?] [?] are the most difficult vowels that Russian students always make errors in the process of acquisition of mandarin vowels.We analyzed a number of factors about the causes which are compound,rather than a single.The negative transfer of mother tongue vowels,overgeneralization of the target language rules,and "fossilization" phenomenon of interlanguage is the major causes of their errors,in addition there are also the transfer of the letters spelling differentiation,cultural adaptation reaction,teaching environment and other factors.Finally,on the basis of the analysis and the specific types of those errors,we divide these vowels into three difficulty levels,and put forward the corresponding teaching suggestions according to the cascade order of "from the easy to the difficult".Among them,we come up with the "simple pattern teaching method" on the basis of the vowel pattern.We hope the experimental phonetics not only can help us with the theory studies,but also can play a practically supporting role in the classroom teaching of Chinese as a foreign language.