Chinese speakers
The following paragraphs are a mixture of my own personal observations with a limited degree of academic reading on the topic; I cannot claim that these observations are completely uncontestable. However, I lived in many different parts of China for many years and taught English for most of that time. I have achieved a moderate degree of competence in Mandarin and am married to a native speaker, which has also contributed to my knowledge on this topic.
Pronunciation problems vary a lot among ‘Chinese speakers’.
Pronunciation problems experienced by ‘Chinese speakers’ vary a lot because there are a number of distinct languages spoken in China and South East Asia which are called ‘Chinese’. Governments, especially that of the PRC refer to these languages as ‘dialects’, despite the fact that they are clearly distinct languages that share vocabulary and linguistic features, just as French and English do. In addition to the fact that many of the ‘dialects’ are separate languages, there are in fact, many dialects of Mandarin. For many Chinese ‘Mandarin’ is a second (or even third or fourth) language for communication with people from another city in their region, but it is often not ‘Standard Mandarin’, and is often not even mutually intelligible with ‘Mandarin’ spoken in another region. My wife is a native speaker of Mandarin, and I remember when we lived in Ningbo how she struggled to communicate with some locals. Often she was not even sure whether they were speaking Mandarin at all. There are many reasons why Mandarin sound different in different places; the fact that Chinese script is not an alphabetic system representing sounds means that speakers of Chinese tend to learn the sounds of words the way they hear them, rather than via a standardizing influence of a phonetic script. Sounds that exist in one Chinese language may not exist in other Chinese languages, and a speaker of Mandarin in one region may not use all of the sounds a speaker of ‘Standard Mandarin’ would use. This has a regionalising impact on the pronunciation of Chinese, resulting in different pronunciation problems when learning English.
Examples of specific regional differences
In the previous paragraph, I mentioned the differences in sounds used by different Chinese speakers, which result in different pronunciation problems in English. Cantonese speakers who don’t speak Mandarin, or speak it poorly provide a good example of this. Most educated young people in Guangzhou speak good Mandarin and have no confusion with the /w/ and /r/ sounds in English, as they are distinct sounds in Mandarin. In contrast, many learners of English from Hong Kong do not speak Mandarin (or don’t speak it well) and confuse these sounds, for example pronouncing ‘ring’ as ‘wing’. Another example can be found in large parts of Southern China, particularly Hunan. It appears that the distinction between /h/ and /f/ and between /l/ and /n/ do not exist in their regional language. Consequently, Chinese from Hunan and other southern provinces confuse these sounds in Mandarin and confuse them in English. They are likely to confuse /f/ and /h/ (e.g. foal/hole) and /l/ and /n/ (e.g. lame/name). A fluent speaker of Standard Mandarin will not confuse these pairs in Mandarin and are unlikely to experience difficulties with them in English.
Differences among age groups and social classes
In addition to regional differences, there are differences among age groups and social classes. However, these regional and demographic differences are slowly being eroded. China is modernising and modernising quickly. As Mandarin is the primary language of education and is the national language, its prestige is high. It is becoming increasingly difficult, if not impossible to thrive as a young professional without Standard Mandarin. Younger, wealthier Chinese (the people most likely to study English) are more likely to be educated in and speak Standard Mandarin, and this will influence their pronunciation in English. Pinyin, the most commonly used Romanised Script in the PRC) is a phonetic alphabet used to teach Chinese children the sounds of Mandarin. This is further contributing to the standardisation of spoken Mandarin and therefore, less diversity in minimal pair problems in English.
The influence of Chinese ESL teachers
Despite the influences which are leading to less diversity in the way Chinese speakers speak English, if you listen to two ‘Chinese speakers’, they may still have quite different pronunciation problems. Who their English teacher was is likely to be a big factor here. When I first went to China in 2004, most English teachers were older, Chinese and often spoke poor, heavily accented English themselves. Lessons often focused on Grammar or Reading, and some teachers rarely used English as the medium of instruction. A younger Chinese speaker who speaks standard Mandarin may have learned pronunciation errors in English from their teacher. I remember being very surprised when a student who spoke English with a strong Fuzhou accent told me he was from Beijing. He was initially surprised that I had thought he was from Fuzhou. However, when I said that he had a Fuzhou accent, he laughed and told me that his high school English teacher was from Fuzhou. However, English language education has come a long way in China over the past 20 years or so. There are many more foreigners living in China and there are more foreigners teaching English. Many Chinese nationals who teach English have lived and studied in English speaking countries. They are younger and far more proficient in English.
Problems common to most Chinese speakers
Before looking at problems with individual sounds and minimal pairs (problems which vary a lot from individual to individual and region to region), let’s consider some problems common to most Chinese speakers. Sometimes a communication breakdown occurs because of a single error, but this is rarely the case. If a speaker produces spoken English with poor rhythm, intonation and sentence stress, that already puts a heavy cognitive load on the listener. If other errors are added on top of this, communication is likely to break down. The following example shows how complex pronunciation problems can be, even at the level of an individual word. I remember a time when I was teaching a class made up entirely of students from Fuquing, China. Apart from very limited English, my students spoke three languages: their hometown dialect, Hokkien (the provincial lingua franca) and poor Mandarin. They were talking to me about someone called ‘Cheese’. I initially had no idea what they were talking about, but from the context, I was able to guess correctly that they were talking about my boss Trish. I later analysed the name to work out why I had heard ‘Cheese’. People from Fujian often struggle with the tr cluster in English and usually pronounce it as /ʧ/. They also confuse /ɪ/ and /i:/, so they produced /ɪ/ as the long sound. Finally, they often produce /ʃ / as /s/. Trish became ‘Cheese’! Of course, when helping learners improve their pronunciation, to avoid cognitive overload, we should only deal with a single issue at a time.
Word and sentence stress
While English is a stress-timed language, Chinese is syllable-timed. In other words, English places different stress on individual words in a sentence and individual syllables in a word, with some syllables being shortened because they are unstressed. Chinese however, gives equal weight and length to each syllable. This means that Chinese speakers often find difficulty with the natural rhythm and intonation of English and sound choppy or staccato to English speakers. It is typical for a Chinese speaking learner of English to struggle with, or be quite unaware of, connected speech. This obviously has implications for their listening, as well as speaking.
Syllable stress
The concept and boundaries of ‘words’ is different in Chinese to that of English. Each individual character in Chinese is a single syllable and there is no concept of syllable stress in Chinese. Consequently, Chinese speakers often struggle with syllable counts and syllable stress. An important strategy is to teach Chinese learners to find out how many syllables a word has and which syllables carry primary and secondary stress. A useful class activity is to read out a number of words which are repeated three times while the students write the words and note the number of syllables. After listening, the learners exchange answers and discuss which syllable is stressed. This will teach them how to recognise the number of syllables and syllable stress. After the activity, they can check their answers at https://dictionary.cambridge.org/ and also listen to the audio files.
Consonant clusters
Consonant clusters (strings of consonants together) without a vowel sound) are often challenging for Chinese speakers. My knowledge of Chinese languages is limited to Mandarin, which I speak to some degree. However, I believe that many of these observations are true of other languages spoken in the Sinosphere. In Mandarin, consonants are always separated by vowels, with the exception of the -ng ending. There are other consonant groupings in Pinyin (Romanised script), such as zh, sh and ch, but like sh, ch and th in English, these are individual sounds, not clusters. A result of this is that many learners struggle with some consonant clusters and have a tendency to insert vowel sounds between certain consonant clusters. For example, they may insert a vowel between s and p in sport and spoon, saying ‘sipoon‘ and ‘support‘ respectively. This also occurs with other clusters such as tr, which is often produced as /ʧ/ as in cheap. Hence train/chain and trip/chip are minimal pair.
Consonant endings
In Mandarin, all words and syllables end in vowels with the exception of the two finals -n and -ng. As a result, some Chinese speakers frequently add schwas /ə/ to the end of words or (in the case of many Cantonese speakers), drop or reduce the final consonant.
© Paul Smit 2006-2020
Spanish speakers
My observations here are guided by my personal experiences of the Spanish language and of Spanish speaking learners of English. I have been speaking Spanish for over 35 years and have lived in a number of countries in Latin America. I have taught English to Spanish speakers and have also taught Spanish for many years and worked as a Spanish<>English translator. The following observations do not focus on differences between the difficulties faced by Spanish speaking learners but rather, on common issues. However, it can be expected that there are differences in the way Spanish speakers pronounce English simply because of regional differences in the way Spanish is spoken and especially, in intonation patterns in different national dialects.
Spanish is the national language of over 20 countries and is widely spoken in others, such as the United States. As a result, there are many varieties of Spanish spoken and speakers of the language pronounce it differently from place to place. For example, in Argentina and in some regions of Mexico, intonation and stress patterns are vastly different from those in other Spanish speaking countries. Therefore it can be expected that the problems they encounter with pronunciation in English may vary. However, generally speaking, Spanish speakers share pronunciation problems in English.
The unphonetic nature of written English
Spanish is a highly phonetic language; that is to say, the way the language is written is closely linked to the way it is pronounced. At the word level, in English, even native speakers may struggle at times to guess the pronunciation of a new word, whilst pronunciation of a written word is entirely predictable in Spanish. While English letters frequently have a number of different pronunciations, this is far less common in Spanish. Furthermore, syllable stress in Spanish follows two very simple rules and is always marked in the written language when it deviates from these two rules. In contrast, written English does not a method for indicating syllable stress. In addition, there are very few cases of silent letters in Spanish. As a result, Spanish speakers tend to make unconscious and often incorrect assumptions about the pronunciation of new words in English.
Shared vocabulary
Spanish and English share many words from the same root, such as communication/comunicación, national/nacional and interesting/interesante and the Spanish pronunciation of these words tends to greatly influence the way Spanish speakers pronounce these words.
Rhythm, sentence stress and connected speech
In contrast to English, which is a stress-timed language, Spanish is a syllable-timed language. Spanish vowels do not vary in length or pitch as they do in English and there are no weak sounds (no schwa). Instruction in rhythm, sentence stress, the schwa, weak/strong forms and connected speech are likely to be helpful to Spanish speaking learners.
Vowel sound confusions
Vowel sounds are particularly confusing for Spanish speakers. Spanish is a syllable-timed language, with each syllable having the same length regardless of the word and Spanish does not have short and long vowels. In contrast, English is stress-timed. Syllables vary in length according to sentence and word stress and vowels have a number of different sounds, depending on a given word or sentence. This complex system results in a system which seems highly irregular and confusing to Spanish speaking learners of English.
Problems distinguishing vowel sounds
English has 5 written vowels, which represent 12 single vowel sounds. However, while Spanish also has 5 written vowels, there are far fewer vowel sounds and Spanish does not have the long/short distinction of English vowels. As a result, Spanish speakers often confuse long and short vowels in English and may not even perceive the differences.
Problems resulting from English vowels and their multiple sounds.
In English, vowels have a number of different pronunciations while in Spanish they mostly have the same or close to the same pronunciation in every word. English has many words such as monkey, enough and Pharaoh, in which the vowels are pronounced differently to what they are in other words. English has five written vowels but twelve vowel sounds (not including diphthongs) and all five written vowels may be pronounced as schwa /ə/ in a given word. Vowel combinations such as ea can be pronounced five different ways, causing great confusion for Spanish speakers, who are used to the highly predictable pronunciation of vowels in Spanish. As a result, Hispanophones tend to make inaccurate guesses about the sound of a vowel or vowel combination in a new word in English.
| Word | Pronounced as |
| monkey | /ˈmɒn.ki/ rather than /ˈmʌn.ki/. |
| money | /ˈmɒn.i/ rather than /ˈmʌn.i/. |
| funny | /ˈfʊni/ or /ˈfɒni:/ rather than /ˈfʌn.i/. |
| but | May be produced as /bʊt/ rather than /bʌt/. |
| cap | /kʌp/ instead of /kæp/ (a is pronounced /ʌ/ in Spanish). |
| cup | /kʊp/ instead of /kʌp/ (u is pronounced as /ʊ/ in Spanish. |
Minimal pairs
/ʃ/ and /ʧ/ as in shoes/choose
/v/ and /b/ as in very/berry
/j/ and /ʤ/ as in yellow/jello
/u:/ and /ʊ/ as in pool an pull
/i:/ and /ɪ/as in seat/sit
/æ/ and /ʌ/ as in cap/cup
© Paul Smit 2006-2020