Mandarin is a tone language, which every Chinese word has a fixed tone. If a tone is changed, the meaning of the word will be changed. Thus, identifying the Hanyu Pinyin pronunciation mistakes is essential and should be prioritized by Mandarin instructors. Numerous pronunciation errors were identified among the undergraduates who were the non-native speakers with difficulties in pronunciation, communication and listening skills in Mandarin. Therefore, this study aims to investigate the pronunciation problems faced by the students as non-native speakers in consonants, vowels and tones based on the Hanyu Pinyin system. The findings of the study show consonant constitutes the highest number of errors (68.29%) as compared to the tone (13.66%) and vowel (18.5%). Among the consonants, most of the students committed errors in the pronunciation of "zh" as 16.43% while the second place goes to the consonant “z", which constitutes 13.57% of errors. The highest inaccuracy in vowel pronunciation happens to the last phoneme “s” as 82.14% while most students had made errors in the second tone as 56.76% and the third tone as 24.32%.
Hence, it can be concluded that the undergraduates were suffering from mastering the Mandarin pronunciation, which had been greatly influenced by Malay language as their first language or mother tongue.
Citation (APA 6th ed.):
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Hence, it can be concluded that the undergraduates were suffering from mastering the Mandarin pronunciation, which had been greatly influenced by Malay language as their first language or mother tongue.
Citation (APA 6th ed.):
Khor, G. S., Arriaga, L. R., & Mah, B. Y. (2013, April). Errors analysis in hanyu pinyin pronunciation among the undergraduates from Universiti Sains Malaysia (USM) Engineering Campus. Paper presented at The Asian Conference on Language Learning 2013, Osaka, Japan. Retrieved from http://iafor.org/Proceedings/ACLL/ACLL2013_Proceedings.pdf
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