An Emperimental Study On The Acquisition Of Chinese Initial Consonants By Sri Lankan Students

As a country along the "Belt and Road" route,Sri Lanka has maintained close and friendly cooperation with China for a long time.It is one of many countries that love Chinese culture and learn Chinese.In recent years,the number of Sri Lankan people coming to China to learn Chinese is increasing day by day.In the process of contact with Sri Lankan students,the author found that they often have a variety of phonetic errors when they communicate in Chinese,which not only makes their spoken Chinese sound unauthentic,but also causes communication obstacles.Pronunciation is the material shell of language and the most external form in the language system.Phonetic teaching is the basis of teaching Chinese as a foreign language and the premise of cultivating students’ listening,speaking,reading,writing and social skills.Mr.Zhao Yuanren has pointed out in Language Problem that the learning of a foreign language involves pronunciation,grammar and vocabulary.The pronunciation is the most difficult and important part,because the essence of language is pronunciation.If the pronunciation is not correct,correspondingly,the grammar and vocabulary is wrong.This shows the foundation and importance of phonetic teaching in teaching Chinese as a foreign language.Initial consonant is one of the important parts of Chinese pronunciation,which is the beginning of a syllable,and it is also the first part that foreign students come into contact with when learning Chinese phonetics.The accuracy of initial consonant pronunciation directly affects the understanding of ideographic meaning.How to help Sri Lankan students learn Chinese consonants,find relatively labor-saving ways to learn consonants,and build confidence in learning Chinese phonetics from the initial consonants is the author’s concern and research focus.The introduction of this paper first describes the research background and significance of this paper,then introduces the current research results of Chinese consonants in the field of Chinese as a foreign language,then introduces the theoretical basis of this paper,and finally explains the research methods used in this paper.The first chapter compares the consonant systems of Chinese and Sinhalese to find out the similarities and differences between them.In the second chapter,an acoustic experiment is designed to test the Chinese initial consonant pronunciation of Sri Lankan students,count the number of errors through speech recognition,calculate the error rate,then analyze the typical errors,and use Praat speech analysis software to produce waveforms and broadband speech diagrams to compare the pronunciation of Sri Lankan students with that of a standard Putonghua speaker to verify the errors.Finally,the types of errors are summarized.The third chapter makes a simple analysis of the causes of errors.The fourth chapter puts forward the teaching countermeasures from the specific types of errors,and further puts forward some teaching suggestions.