| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立東華大學 === 中國語文學系 === 106 === For the past few years, more and more foreigners come to China and Taiwan to learn Mandarin with global craze for learning Mandarin. Sounds are learners first contact. Then it will expand into other categories such as vocabulary, grammar, text, and pragmatics. Therefore, the sounds can be regarded as the most basic part of language learning. If the sounds are not well-handed, it may affect communication.
Taiwanese diplomatic relations are mostly in Central and South America and the Caribbean. The exchange between the two sides are quite frequent. The ICDF also provides scholarship to encourge students who are in the countries of diplomatic relations to study abroad in Taiwan. As a result, Latin American Spanish speakers in Taiwan have gradually increased.
This article explains Latin American Spanish speakers’situation that they learn Mandarin pronunciation in National Dong Hwa University. Since Latin American Spanish and Mandarin belong to different language families, the similarities and differences between the two languages will inevitably affect the students’ acquisition processes. Therefore, contrastive analysis will be used to compare the phonetic levels between the two languages to predict the possible difficulties for students to learn Mandarin consonants, vowels and tones. Then, using the Mandarin syllables test table to investigate the actual errors of Spanish speakers of primary and intermediate Mandarin levels. And calculate the numbers and rates of errors, sum up types of errors, and explain the possible causes of errors. Later, this article compares the errors of Spanish speakers of primary and intermediate Mandarin levels, deduces the difficulties of learning, and reveals the learners’ phonetic development processes. Finally, the self-perceived difficulties of the questionnaires which are filled out by the learners and actual errors will be compared in order to explore their relationships.
The study finds that some of the errors are caused by interference of mother language. This also verifies the predictions of partial contrastive analysis. However, some of the errors are also affected by the factors such as intralingual transfers, Hanyu Pinyin, and the social context in which the learners are located. While the learners can learn some of the pronunciations completely, some of the pronunciations still cannot be fully learned by intermediate level students.
This article uses the contrastive analysis, error analysis and questionnaire to survey the learners’ difficulties to learn Mandarin pronunciation. On the basis of this, teachers and researchers can further explore the research on the teaching strategies and curriculum design of Latin American Spanish speakers.
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