Zimbabwean Students’ Perception of Chinese Sounds

Abstract

The present survey seeks to find out Zimbabwean student’s perception of Chinese sounds. The survey was carried out in 8 different schools in Harare, the capital city of Zimbabwe. 23 Chinese words with different initials representing all the consonants in Chinese language were used for the survey. During the survey Chinese words were read to students who had never studied Chinese and the students were asked to write down what they hear using Latin letters. The results of the survey shows that Zimbabwean students in Harare have either English influenced perception or Shona influenced perception. However, there were some instances where random pattern was observed, this could be due to the uniqueness of the given Chinese sounds. We concluded that when teaching Chinese or any other foreign languages a pre-survey is required in order to establish the prevailing influential language. In Zimbabwe any local language at any given place can be more influential in terms of shaping students’ perception towards the target language.