CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION : A.Background for Choosing the Study

A COMPARATIVE STUDY BETWEEN MANDARIN AND ENGLISH PHONOLOGICAL SYSTEM

by
Raditya Adipromono
04 026 055

CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION

A. Background for Choosing the Study

It is known that people can understand each other when they speak in a particular language because it is an essential thing in human communication. People use language to make an interaction to other people. By communication which uses a language, someone is able to transfer some ideas and information to someone else.

It is a fact that a student of English Department must have an ability to speak English, and also is able to criticize linguistic aspect in a language like sound, tone (pitch), syllable, etc. In human speech, sound is the basic of human speaking. Sound here in Linguistics is recognized as phone. So that phone is common need of speech communication. But each language has its phone system. It can cause misspelling when a speaker speaks another language which is different from the speaker’s mother tongue. For example it is difficult for Chinese person who speaks English to say “vision”, because in Mandarin language, there is no [v] phone. On the contrary, English speaker usually has a difficulty to speak Mandarin language, because it has different phone spelling and some tones which can make different meaning.
The phenomena above will be analyzed by the writer especially the phonological aspect on Mandarin and English phone. The researcher interested to discuss about Mandarin phone which is so different from English. Many languages -except Mandarin- use tone to express contrast, emotion, or other situation without changing the lexical meaning. In the contrary, all syllables of Mandarin language carry a lexical meaning. This makes the researcher has interest on the aesthetic value in art of a language. The researcher chooses Mandarin for this research because the researcher feels that the materials of this research are known enough by the researcher and it will be beneficial to this study.

B. Problem Formulation