Comparative Analysis of Phonetic Systems of the Russian, French and Chinese Languages

Abstract

This choice of this material for comparison — the phonetic systems of three languages: Russian, French and Chinese — is due to the fact that in the process of teaching the Russian language to foreign students, teachers face the need to work with a multilingual audience, which may include speakers of different and often unrelated languages while the formation of phonetic skills is an indispensable condition for adequate verbal communication and successful verbal communication in general. It was these circumstances that led to the choice of three languages for comparative analysis. The main purpose of such a comparison is the possibility of predicting possible interference errors in the speech of foreigners at the phonetic level. Comparative analysis revealed that, despite the colossal structural difference between French and Chinese, there are many points of contact, on the basis of which it is quite realistic to predict common pronunciation errors for French and Chinese audiences. As a result of the study, the authors came to the conclusion that similar features of the phonetic systems of French and Chinese, leading to interference errors, can be due to the belonging of both languages to the vocal type. Problems related to the rules of positional changes associated with the consonantism characteristic of the Russian language are also common to speakers of French and Chinese. When comparing the rhythmic and intonational features of the three languages, it becomes obvious that in this aspect, the speakers of French and Chinese are also characterized by common typical mistakes: the lack of reduction of unstressed vowels, the incorrect allocation of a stressed syllable, and the indistinguishability of intonational structures. The relevance of the study is due to the need to develop nationally-oriented courses in phonetics, which would allow to correctly build work on the localization and prevention of interference errors in the speech of foreign students in a multilingual audience.