Difficulties in Acquisition of Chinese Tones by Sri Lankan Students
Sammanie Upadya Kandambi · SSRN Electronic Journal · 2018
Chinese is the most-widely spoken language in the world. It is also known as Mandarin Chinese and belongs to the Sino-Tibetan family of languages. The Mandarin spoken in the country’s capital of Beijing is the official national language of mainland China, termed as Putonghua (common language). In contemporary society, Chinese language-learning has been promoted among many countries in the world. Sri Lanka is one such country — it has already taken successful measures to teach Chinese language to local people. In the process of learning Chinese, Sri Lankans students have experienced a number of difficulties due to intra-language socio cultural differences. As Chinese language is a tonal language based on four different tones such as first, second, third and fourth tone, Chinese language learning students in Sri Lanka have undergone many difficulties due to this varied pronunciation system. The communication problems might be occurred due to the incorrect ways of pronunciation. For instance, the pronunciation of “Hanyu” according to the forth tone in Chinese, means the “Chinese language” while it means “Korean language” by pronouncing according to the second tone. These kinds of pronunciation errors can be seen especially among Sri Lankan students as they have become accustomed to their own sounds and tonal systems in Sinhala language. Therefore, for an accurate way of pronunciation, the Sri Lankan students should strongly keep in touch with Chinese tones and they should daily practice speaking Chinese language in order to overcome occurring communication errors when they come into practice using Chinese language with the native speakers. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the difficulties encountered by Sri Lankan students during the process of acquiring Chinese tones and the suggestions to overcome them.