The Comparison of Hungarian and Chinese Phonological Systems: A Pedagogical Perspective

Abstract

This paper is intended to contribute to the teaching of Chinese as a foreign language in Hungary by filling a notable gap in the literature. There have been few studies of the specific differences between Hungarian and Chinese and none at all which apply contrastive analysis of phonetic and phonological systems for pedagogical purposes. After a brief general introduction of Hungarian and Chinese, the paper offers an in-depth comparison between the segmental and suprasegmental phonetic systems of the two languages. The comparison is divided into separate sections, each of which is further subdivided, dealing with consonants, vowels, syllable tones, syllable structure, stress and intonation. The paper continues with a discussion of which of the identified differences are likely to cause difficulties both in terms of acquisition by Hungarian learners and in terms of communicative efficiency. The two features that emerge as the most problematic are suprasegmental intonation and syllable tone. The latter, given its essential and pervasive semantic value, is proposed as the feature that deserves the most attention of teachers and learners.