Difficulties in Perception and Pronunciation of Mandarin Chinese Disyllabic Word Tone Acquisition: A Study of Some Japanese University Students

Tonal errors pose a serious problem to Mandarin Chinese learners, making them stumble in their communication. The purpose of this paper is to investigate beginner level Japanese students’ difficulties in the perception and pronunciation of disyllabic words, particularly to find out which combinations of tones these errors mostly occur in. As a result, the errors made by the 10 subjects were mostly found in tonal patterns 1-3, 2-1, 2-3, 3-2 and 4-3 in both perception and pronunciation. Furthermore, by comparing the ratio of tonal errors of initial to final syllables, we can tell that the initial syllables appear more difficult than the final syllables in perception, but in pronunciation this tendency is not found. Moreover, there seems to be some connection between learners’ perception and pronunciation in their acquisition process.