which we say, masculine, feminine or neuter form of the nouns, and it has very complicated grammar system.
With the increasingly bilateral exchanges and cooperation between China and Romania in the fields of politics, economy, culture, education and other aspects, we will need more and more people who know both Chinese and Romanian language. Romania and China always have a very good relationship, to know and understand the language of each other could also be necessary to keep the good relationship, exchange and connection between the two countries.
Language itself is the culture of the respective country, when we learn a new language, the differences between the two cultures and languages must be taken into consideration, so as to avoid the inappropriate transfer mistakes. This article briefly analysis some negative transfer phenomenon during Romanian students’ Chinese learning, especially for the beginners, in order to make the Chinese teachers’ teaching activity and Romanian students’ Chinese learning process more effectively and efficiently.
2. Language transfer phenomenon during Romanian students’ Chinese learning 2.1. Phonological transfer When we learn a new language, transfer may take place in all the different areas of the language, such as, phonology, phonetics, semantics, syntax, pragmatics etc. Jarvis and Pavlenko( 2007: 62) define phonological transfer as“ the ways in which a person’ s knowledge of the sound system of one language can affect that person’ s perception and production of speech sounds in another language”.
When the students learn another new language, they will bring their native accent unconsciously, this is the phenomenon known by all the linguistics, a lot of references also have been made in the field of the language transfer.
For analyzing Romanian students’ Chinese learning, for the beginners, the phonetic is an important part. I would begin with the phonological transfer.
Romanian is formed from the Latin letters; it is composed of 31 letters, which are: A / a, Ă / ă, Â / â, B / b, C / c, D / d, E / e, F / f, G / g, H / h, I / i, Î / î, J / j, K / k, L / l, M / m, N / n, O / o, P / p, Q / q, R / r, S / s, Ș / ș, T / t, Ț / ț, U / u, V / v, W / w, X / x, Y / y, Z / z. In comparison with the Chinese Pinyin, which uses 26 letters, there are Ă / ă, Â / â, Î / î, Ș / ș and Ț / ț in plus in Romanian language.
Chinese Pinyin, which we can consider as the phonetic system of the Chinese characters, it is a standard system of Romanized spelling for transcribing the pronunciations of Chinese characters; it helps people to understand how to read and how to pronounce the respective character. Chinese Pinyin, or Chinese phonetic, is composed of the initials, finals and the four tones, the initials are put at the beginning of the syllable while the finals are put at the end of the syllable.
For any foreigner who wants to learn Chinese, we need to learn firstly the Chinese phonetics. There are 23 initials( b, p, m, f, d, t, n, l, g, k, h, j, q, x, zh, ch, sh, r, z, c, s, w, y) and 24 finals( a, o, e, i, u, ü, ai, ei, ui, ie, ou, uo, ui, üe, er, an, en, in, un, ün, ang, eng, ing, ong) in Chinese Pinyin.
For the Romanian students, it is not very hard to pronounce the Chinese finals, since a lot of finals, the pronunciation can be found in the Romanian phonetics. But for the initials, teachers should pay more attention when teaching the Romanian students especially when the students pronounce b and p, d and t; researches found out that these two pairs of pronunciation seems to be the most difficult for the Romanian students to distinguish, for a Chinese student who learns Romanian, these two pairs are also hard to learn.
For the Romanian students, more than half of the beginners( from the teaching experience) would make the mistakes in the pronunciation of b and p, d and t in Chinese, basically that is because the negative transfer of the native language.
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