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

 629  The Structure of the Mandarin Syllable: why, when and how to teach it   On the other hand, Chinese students may not be sensitive to the diffe- rences in vowel quantity while learning Czech. • In Czech, /n/ in a coda position ( p n “gentleman”) ought to be pro- nounced with a complete closure in the alveolar region (i. e. the air- stream passing through the nasal and oral cavities is obstructed by the contact of the tongue at the alveolar ridge); after a closure an audi- ble release may follow prepausally. In Mandarin, a terminal / n / has different properties: the contact of the tongue is frequently missing in the spontaneous speech of native speakers (see below). Czech students may thus have trouble with Mandarin syllables such as min, huan etc.: they may consistently strive to reach the articulatory target for [n] , which may sound unnatural and hypercorrect. Furthermore, students sometimes pronounce such Mandarin syllables with an audible release, which is definitely wrong. • In Czech assimilations to a neighboring segment are typical for con- sonants, e. g. vstup “the entrance” is pronounced as [fstup] . Such as- similations may cause problems for Chinese learners of Czech (* [vs- tup] ). On the other hand, vowel quality is rather stable in Czech, and not much influenced by the neighboring segments. In Mandarin the situation is basically the opposite: it is mainly the vowels which un- dergo assimilations, e. g. ban is pronounced as [pan] , while bang is pronounced as [paŋ] (see below). Czech students frequently ignore these assimilations, being insensitive to vowel quality changes. Of course, the concrete problems that native speakers of various lan- guages may struggle with vary. For example, the difficulties experienced by Czech students will certainly be different from the difficulties faced by Japanese, Thai, American or Russian students. Some of the problems may be shared by all learners, however. Components at the level of segments — C, G, V, X As shown above, four structural components can be established at the lev- el of segments in the Mandarin syllable. We marked them as C, G, V, X. Their specific role (or function) within a syllable is defined by their position within a syllable template. For simplicity’s sake we assume that a particular position implies a particular function and use both terms (i. e. function and position) alternatively. Each position has its own inventory of segments — see the table in Fig. 6 below (the phonemes are in Pīnyīn ); there may be no more than one segment inserted in a particular position.