Phonological (esp. contrastive) analyses of various depth-levels have been applied in foreign language teaching (FLT) for several decades now, and (with the growing access to its basic technical apparatus) phonetic measurements have also been utilized for helping to uncover problem areas, and to find solutions, in the particular area of teaching pronunciation.
In the past 7-8 years there has been an upsurge of interest in this kind of study (w.r.t. teaching Mandarin pronunciation to Hungarian learners) in the sinology master';s and doctoral programs of Eötvös Loránd University (Budapest), giving rise to a number of interesting results in theses and other papers, involving H. Bartos either as supervisor, or co-author (or both). Our presentation is intended as a survey of these.
The specific areas to be covered include: - the production of tones (Ye 2013, Ye & Bartos 2017) - the pronunciation of Mandarin obstruents (Tusor 2016, Bartos, Ye & Tusor 2016, Juhász 2021) - the pronunciation of mid- and (so-called) apical vowels of Mandarin (Juhász 2020)
We will introduce our initial hypotheses, the methods applied, the experiments aiming to shed light on the problems, as well as the findings.
Huba Bartos is senior research fellow (and currently also deputy director-general) at the Hungarian Research Centre for Linguistics, and holds a part-time position as associate professor at the Institute of East Asian Studies of Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, as well. His research focus is syntax, semantics and morphology (both in general, and working on Mandarin Chinese in particular), but his recent interests include phonetics and phonology, too. He is co-editor-in-chief of a pair of new Chinese–Hungarian / Hungarian–Chinese dictionaries (the former was published in 2019, with about 90,000 entries, while the latter is still in the works). He is a regular speaker at the conferences of both the International Association of Chinese Linguistics (IACL) and the European Association of Chinese Linguistics (EACL), having served on the board of both organizations, and having organized conferences for both in Budapest (EACL-4 in 2006, and IACL-25 in 2017).
Kornélia Juhász holds an M.A. in Chinese studies (Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest), now attending the Applied Linguistics Doctoral Program of the same university, currently in the second year of the training. Her research area is the acoustical analysis of Mandarin Chinese speech sounds in the production of Hungarian learners of Chinese.