(Download) "German is Not Necessarily More Difficult Than English: Evidence from a Comparison Among English, German and Hanyu Pinyin/ L'allemand N'est Pas Forcement Plus Difficile que L'anglais: Conclusion Tiree D'une Comparaison Entre L'anglais, L'allemand Et Le Pinyin." by Canadian Social Science # eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: German is Not Necessarily More Difficult Than English: Evidence from a Comparison Among English, German and Hanyu Pinyin/ L'allemand N'est Pas Forcement Plus Difficile que L'anglais: Conclusion Tiree D'une Comparaison Entre L'anglais, L'allemand Et Le Pinyin.
- Author : Canadian Social Science
- Release Date : January 01, 2007
- Genre: Social Science,Books,Nonfiction,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 280 KB
Description
1. INTRODUCTION When it comes to the similarities and differences between any two languages, we cannot avoid thinking of their origins. German and English, as near neighbors of Germanic branch in the Indo-European languages, are very different from Chinese, a big member of the Sino-Tibetan language family. In spite of this, the German language is not that strange to those Chinese students who have started to learn it at the very beginning of their study at colleges of foreign languages or in a language course offered by any domestic institutions concerned. On the one hand, they might have learnt some Enlgish knowledge which is usually a compusory subject at high school; on the other hand, they might have a good commond of Hanyu Pinyin at primary school or even in the pre-schooling days, obtaining some basic ideas about the phonetic alphabet and the phonetic transcription of Putonghua (the Chinese Common Speech). Hanyu Pinyin, which records the standard form of pronunciation of Chinese characters with Latin letters, was enacted at the first people's congress of China in 1958. Possessing such previous knowledge, they might probably perceive some simplicity of German language from the early stage of their learning. The simplicity lies in the relatively higher grade of identity between the name of vowel letters and their sounds in words. In the first class the teacher, when introducing German alphabet, writes an "a" and an "A" on the blackboard, and then asks the students to read them aloud. For the students it is not difficult for them to recognize them and to write them down, what they need to learn instead is the name of the letters. They need to know that "a" and "A" in German are termed not "[eI]" but "[a:]". The teacher will write a few words such as "Tag, Bad, Mal" as examples for correct pronunciation. The students will see that the name of "a" and the sound of it in those words are identical. After they have become well acquainted with all the five vowel letters, i.e. to know how to call them ([a:], [e:], [i:], [o:], [u:]), how to write them (a, e, , o, u), and how to pronounce them (/a:/, /a/, /e:/, /[epsilon]/, /i:/, /I/, /o:/, / [??] /, /u:/, /U/), the students could probably get rid of the usual bias that German is much more difficult to learn than English and feel happy about their choice of German as their major.