How Polish Students Develop Mandarin Pronunciation through Intensive Training

Abstract

Many studies (C. McBride-Chang et al. 2008; E. Bialystok et al., 2005) have shown that the syllable is the basic unit when learning Chinese pronunciation. This study attempts to explore how adult native speakers of Polish (non-tonal language with the alphabet based on Latin script) develop Chinese tonal syllables through intensive training at the beginning level. Students from the Faculty of Philology participated in a four-stage phonetic teaching program and experiment. First, learners exercise excessive articulation of vowels, practicing how to carry the tone. Secondly, students try to assign the meaning to the joined segmental and supra-segmental phonetic units. Then, acquisition of Chinese morphemes/lexemes is supported with characters to differentiate homophones in the learning process. Finally, students are trained to decode the heard syllables in a sequence into meaningful phases and sentences. Next, based on the ongoing training, the pronunciation experiment in two series provides an insight into the development of the Chinese syllable production.