Common Mistakes Chinese speakers make in English

The Chinese language (specifically, Standard Mandarin) is among the most popular languages spoken around the world. With at least 918 million native speakers, it should be no surprise that you'll likely encounter many people who grew up speaking Mandarin.

However, it is quite a different language than English, and so Chinese speakers can make a lot of mistakes when learning English. Let's go over some common pronunciation mistakes a Chinese speaker might make!

Consonants and Vowels

Common mistakes Chinese speakers make usually have to do with lettering. Chinese languages tend to lack consonants at the end of words and multiple consonants in a sequence. As of result, Chinese speakers tend to omit various consonants in English words. For example, 'mask' would be pronounced like 'mass' without the 'k' being pronounced. Other examples include 'mixing' becoming 'missing', and 'most' becoming 'mos'.

Chinese speakers may also add an extra vowel to break up consonant sequence, usually in the form of an 'uh' sound. Thus, words like 'cat' sound like 'cat-uh', and 'please' sounds like 'puh-lease'.

Commonly for Chinese speakers, an 'L' sound is used for an 'R' sound at the beginning of words. Chinese speakers often also have trouble with 'th' sounds, replacing them with variations of 's', 'z,', 't', or 'd' sounds. As a result, a series of words like 'rather than rush' can end up sounding like 'lah-dah dan lush'.

Common Mistakes Chinese Speakers Make in Rhythm, Stress and Pronouns

Chinese speakers use tones and intonation in a much different way than English speakers. In English, tones help indicate stress and emphasize certain words in sentences. In Chinese, stress is not used this way, and you might find that it's hard to identify just one place of stress in a Chinese speaker's speech.

That's all for now. While this is by no means an exhaustive list, this covers a lot of major mistakes. Keep working on those 'R' and 'TH' sounds, avoid adding extra vowels, and try to pronounce all consonant sounds in words.

Want to learn more about common mistakes? Check out our blog posts on common mistakes made by French and Spanish speakers.