Проблемы китайского и общего языкознания. К 90-летию С. Е. Яхонтова

 626  Hana Třísková   It seems that Chinese authors are seldom aware of the fact that the syl- lable structure in the mother tongues of foreign students or readers of their books may be rather different from the syllable structure in Mandarin. Being native speakers of Chinese, they are not sensitive to the potential problems that foreign students may struggle with. Yet the differences in syllable struc- ture between students’ mother tongues and the target language — Mandarin may trigger numerous mistakes in pronunciation. These mistakes are often endlessly repeated, as their underlyinɡ causes have a systematical character. We shall now provide an example of a language with a considerably different syllable structure: it is the case of Czech. A comparison between Mandarin and Czech syllable structures The structure of the Mandarin syllable reviewed above indicates that the Mandarin syllable is rather different from the syllable of many Euro- pean languages. Let us make a comparison with the Czech syllable (Czech is the native language of the author of this article). The structure of the Czech syllable is highly complex. It can be portrayed in the following way (Fig. 5). syllable O R N Co C C C C         V/VV/C  C C C v    z     t     l    a k   “ buoyancy”  z  á     b     s     t    “ to feel cold”  b    r ou k   “ beetle”  k  r k   “ throat”  Figure 5. The syllable structure in Czech