“The main purpose of learning English is to pass the entrance examination. The major part of learning is to memorize new words and learn grammatical rules with very little time devoting to oral English practice. Good pronunciation is usually ignored.” 

- Mandarin Chinese speaker interviewed by Dan Liu

Segmental Features: Vowels

To begin, one major difference between Mandarin Chinese and English is the number of vowels present in each. In fact, according to Han,   while Mandarin Chinese only has five vowels, English has 15. Because of this, Baker (1982) as cited by Radant and Huang,    Bian,  and Han,   have identified several English vowels that Mandarin Chinese speakers tend to struggle with. These are listed below for ease of reference:

​

• /i/ and /ɪ/ form minimal pairs in English, but not in Mandarin. Thus, Mandarin speakers confuse these vowels in words such as “sheep” and “ship”). In fact, generally speaking, tense and lax vowel minimal pairs may be difficult for Mandarin Chinese speakers. Other common tense and lax vowel minimal pairs in English include /u/ and /ʊ/ and /æ/ or /e/ and /ɛ/.

​

• Mandarin speakers may attempt to vary the length of their native vowel  /ɑ/ in order to reproduce the respective English vowels /ɑː/ and /ʌ/ (as in “cart” and “cut”).

​

• Because /ɑ/ and /ɪ/ are hard for Mandarin speakers, the diphthong /ɑɪ/ is also difficult. Additionally, Mandarin speakers often confuse /ɑɪ/ with /æ/ and /ɛ/. Thus,  Mandarin speakers may have difficulty differentiating between “bide,” “bed,” and “bad” in English.

​

• Mandarin speakers tend to mix /ɑʊ/ up /ɔ:/ and /ɔ/, resulting in difficulties differentiating between words like “house” and “horse.”

​

Segmental Features: Consonants

In addition to struggling with several vowel sounds, despite both languages having about the same number of consonants, Mandarin speakers may struggle with several consonants in English that do not exist in their native language.   Identified by Bian,   Han,   and Tzwe (1987) and Chang (2001) as cited by Radant and Huang    some consonants in English that are particularly difficult for Mandarin speakers include the following:

​

• Mandarin speakers often replace the dental fricatives /θ/ and /ð/ with the alveolar fricatives /s/ and /z/.

​

• /v/ and /w/ are allophones (i.e., the sounds are interchangeable) in Mandarin Chinese, thus Mandarin speakers may confuse one for the other in English.

​

• While  /ʒ, ŋ, θ, z, s, v, tʃ, f, l/ are generally difficult, Chang as cited by Radant and Huang    found that / ʒ, s, z, v / may pose specific difficult for Taiwanese Mandarin speakers. 

​

• Some Mandarin speakers may over-apply retroflexes at the end of English words. 

​

However, with this in mind, several other consonants in English, such as /b/, /p/, /d/, /t/, /g/, and /k/, are very similar to their Mandarin Chinese counterparts.   Thus, Mandarin speakers often pick them up in English with general ease.  

​

Suprasegmental Features: Syllable Structure

One of the most pervasive causes for English pronunciation errors among native Mandarin Chinese speakers is the difference in syllable structure between the two languages. Specifically, according to Třísková,   Mandarin Chinese only has four possible positions for phonemes to fill within a given syllable, and, of these, only the third position (which can only contain vowels) is obligatory. Therefore, generally speaking Mandarin Chinese syllables are rather simple in their construction, and rarely end in consonants. As such, Hansen’s (2001) assertion as cited by Zielinski    that Mandarin Chinese does not allow for syllable-final consonant clusters makes sense. 

​

On the other hand, English syllables have no issue using syllable final consonants. In fact, multiple consonants in a row are often present at the end of syllables in English, and these kinds of consonant clusters can quickly become complex, as can be seen in the structures of “splurged” (CCCVCCC)    or “glimpsed” (CCVCCCC).   Because of this, native speakers of Mandarin Chinese often struggle to pronounce all of the consonants in a given cluster at the end of English syllables, a problem that is often solved by either dropping consonants completely or inserting an extra vowel in before/after the consonant.   For example of this, Zielinski    describe how one Mandarin speaker they studied pronounced the word “just,” which follows the syllable pattern CVCC, as [ʤʌstǝ], where the vowel /ǝ/ has been added to the end. In addition, though they are not  consonant clusters, consonants that only ever appear syllable initially in Mandarin (such as /l/), may be replaced with vowels when they occur syllable finally in English. 

​

Suprasegmental Features: Lexical Stress

Within a word, stress can be defined as an added emphasis given to certain syllables.  According to Roach (2008) as cited by Liu   and Zhang et al.,   the following four traits are generally true of stressed syllables:

​

• They are produced louder 

• They last longer

• They have a higher pitch

• The vowels within them have a distinct quality

​

And, though stress is relegated to fixed positions within many languages, in English, word/syllable stress is often important in determining a word’s meaning. In fact, several nouns and verbs are only distinguished by their differences in stress patterns. For examples of some of these words, please follow this link. 

​

​

​

On the other hand, rather than use stress, Mandarin Chinese employs four different tones to distinguish between words.   According to Liu and Zhang et al.,   these tones are as follows:

​

• T1:  a high level tone

• T2: a rising tone 

• T3: a dip-rise tose 

• T4: a falling tone

​

Importantly, unlike English stress, length and loudness do not have a large impact on Mandarin tones.     Rather, they are largely distinguished by changes in pitch. Because of this difference between tones and syllable stress, many native speakers of Mandarin Chinese have difficulty both perceiving and producing correct word stress in English. 

​

Besides this, Liu   also identified several of the following factors as other reasons why native Mandarin Chinese speakers may have trouble using correct word stress when speaking English:

​

• Mandarin Chinese speakers may have an inadequate knowledge of syllable structure. That is, they don’t grasp that strong syllables (i.e., long vowel/dipthong (+coda)) are typically stressed while weak syllables (i.e., short vowel - coda) are typically unstressed. 

​

• Mandarin Chinese speakers may incorrectly pronounce vowels, a practice which may lead to improper stress placement. For example, if a speaker mispronounces “Pacific” as  ['pæsifik] instead of the correct [pə'sifik],  they will incorrectly give the stress to the first syllable.

​

• Mandarin Chinese speakers may over-rely on lexical class (e.g., noun, verb, adjective) to determine where stress goes. For instance, if a given word is a noun, many may default to placing stress on the first syllable, which, though a legitimate pattern in English, isn’t always correct.  

​

However, with this in mind, it should also be noted that, according to Chen et al. (2001) as cited by Zhang et al.,   Mandarin Chinese speakers do use things such as a pitch, length, and amplitude to indicate stress in English. However, the way in which they do so is different from how a native English speaker would. Some examples of this, as observed by Zhang et al.   include the following:

​

• Perhaps due to the greater pitch variation caused by tones, Mandarin Speakers often produce stressed syllables in English with a higher F0 (fundamental frequency) than native English speakers.

​

• Mandarin speakers’ pitch often peaks earlier in unstressed syllables than native English speakers.

​

• Mandarin speakers were about 2db less intense when speaking than native English speakers.

​

• Possibly due to these phonemes' absence in Mandarin, Mandarin speakers may incorrectly reduce specific English vowels in unstressed positions (e.g., reducing /ɑ/ to /ə/).

​

For some more pointers on how to teach proper English word stress patterns, please visit this website. 

​

​

​

Suprasegmental Features: Sentence Stress and Intonation

Similar to stress on the word level (i.e., lexical stress), English (as well as many other languages) also applies stress to the sentence level. However, here, rather than change the lexical meaning of what was said, sentence stress has a more nuanced impact on pragmatic meaning.    For example, among other things, phrasal stress can highlight contrasting or important information. 

Interestingly, Mandarin Chinese is also noted to have sentence stress, and some researchers, as indicated by Liu    think native speakers of Mandarin Chinese have a greater capacity for indicating sentence stress than do native speakers of English. However, similar to word-level stress, in using a higher F0 and greater intensity, Mandarin speakers may go about producing sentence level stress differently than do native English speakers, but this difference may not be highly salient. 

​

Regardless, it is important to understand that, while English is a stress-timed language, Mandarin Chinese is a syllable-timed language.   With this in mind, in English, stressed syllables must occur at regularly timed intervals.  However, in Mandarin, the length of utterance depends entirely on how many syllables are present. Due to this difference, when speaking English, native Mandarin Chinese speakers often “create a flat, monotonic pitch structure unfamiliar to NS hearers.”

​

Finally, intonation, which refers to how pitch varies across the sentence as a whole, may lead to confusion among those who speak Mandarin Chinese as a first language when speaking English. For example, according to Han,   despite both Mandarin Chinese and English using final rising-falling intonation in sentences, Mandarin also applies rising-falling intonation to yes-no questions. In English, these questions are indicated using final rising intonation. Thus, native Mandarin Chinese speakers may have a hard time remembering the difference in intonation between these two types of questions.

​

For some more help identifying the pronunciation issues discussed above, we have provided a case study whose audio can be accessed by following this link.

This speaking sample, Hebei 1, was produced by a 21-year-old man from Cangzhou, China and was recorded by the International Dialect of English Archive. The illustrative error transcriptions below are organized by general category of error and include a timestamp that indicates where in the recording they each occurred.

​

Segmental Errors: Vowels

• [1:33]: Rather than say [sɛntɪmɛntl̩] with the correct long/lax vowel, the speaker instead produced it with a short/tense vowel, resulting in [sɛntimɛntl̩]. 

​

• [1:41]: The speaker says [itʃi] instead of [ɪtʃi], again confusing /i/ and /ɪ/.

​

• [3:00]: The speaker says /ɹɛkwæɹd/ instead of /ɹɛkwɑɪɹd/, an example of replacing the diphthong /ɑɪ/ with the monophthong  /æ/.

​

Segmental Errors: Consonants

• [0:17]: The speaker pronounces the /v/ at the start of “veterinary” as a /w/. This confusion may stem from the fact that these two phonemes are interchangeable in Mandarin Chinese.

​

• [0:25]: Here, the speaker pronounced the “the” in the phrase “the territory” like [zə] instead of the correct [ðə]. Thus, the voiced interdental fricative /ð/ has been replaced with the voiced alveolar fricative /z/. 

​

• [0:38]: There is a possible retroflex phoneme added to the end of the word “area” at this point in the recording. This is also noticeable at [1:47].

​

• [1:10]: Similar to the error at [0:17], the speaker incorrectly pronounces the /w/ at the start of “waiting” as a /v/. 

​

Suprasegmental Features: Syllable Structure

• [0:23]: At this point, “old zoo” is pronounced closer to [oʊldə zu] instead of the correct [oʊld zu]. This is an example of the speaker inserting a vowel sound in between two consecutive consonants. 

​

• [1:20]: The speaker pronounces “rare form” as [ɹɛɹɛ fom] instead of the correct [ɹɛɹ foɹm]. Thus, this is not only an example of vowel insertion, but also of consonant deletion as different ways to deal with difficult consonant clusters. 

​

• [2:03]: The speaker drops the consonant /g/ from the consonant cluster at the end of the word “strong.”

​

• [2:12]: Here, the word “gently” is mispronounced as [d͡ʒɛntəli] instead of the correct [d͡ʒɛntli].

​

Suprasegmental Errors: Word Stress

• [0:26]: Here, the speaker excludes the secondary stress on the third syllable of “territory.” While this is unusual in American English, this pronunciation may reflect British English.   

​

• [0:33]: Though the speaker correctly places stress on the second syllable of “superb,” the pitch difference seems to be a bit more extreme and/or pronounced than how a native English speaker would go about doing this. 

​

• [0:47]: The way stress is applied to the word “morning” here sounds unnatural. 

​

• [1:50]: Similar to “territory,” the speaker seems to omit the stress on the 4th syllable of “unsanitary” at this point. But again, this may reflect a pronunciation more similar to British English than American English. 

​

• [2:27]: Because of a vowel error where the speaker mispronounces “futile” as [fjutil] instead of  [fjutaɪl], it sounds like stress is being improperly given to the second syllable of the word. 

​

• [3:14]: Again due to a vowel error where the speaker pronounces “penicillin” as [pɛnisɪlɪn] instead of [pɛnɪsɪlɪn], it sounds like stress is being improperly given to the second syllable. Alternatively, this may be an example of the speaker failing to properly reduce the tense /i/ to the lax /ɪ/ in an unstressed syllable. 

​

Suprasegmental Errors: Sentence Stress and Intonation

• [0:13-0:19]: This segment is an example of the speaker using syllable-timing instead of stress-timing in their speech. 

​

• [1:57-2:02]: Here, the speaker forgets to apply a falling intonation to mark the end of a statement.