Why Thai learners of Japanese language misheard ‘nan-nichi’ as ‘nan-ji’? : A Contrastive study of Thai and Japanese Speech Sounds

Abstract

This is a contrastive study. The objective of this study was to clarify the cause of learners' mishearing of ‘nan-nichi’ (what date) as ‘nan-ji’ (what time). The Japanese major students make this sort of mistake frequently. Why do the learners find it difficult to distinguish those two different words? To avoid learners’ miscommunication, the author made a hypothesis: The plosive sounds reduce air release in intervocalic position of a word and the sounds are understood as unaspirated sounds for Thai. The findings of this study were as follows:  1) plosive sounds reduce the air in intervocalic position and learners understand it as unaspirated sounds. 2) Plosive sounds and air-reduced plosive sounds are the same phoneme for Japanese, however, they are different sounds and different phonemes for Thai learners. Thus the reduced plosive should be an allophone for Thai learners. These results are beneficial not only to Thai leaners but also to Japanese language teachers to improve listening and teaching.