English with a Chinese characteristic - 005

English with a Chinese characteristic - 005
This is the "005" installment of this series.

This one is dedicated to the pronunciation difficulties experienced by many Chinese software professionals I am personally acquainted with.

From my old American housemate Dave in the 1970's, "If you cannot hear the difference, you cannot say it correctly." Find a native speaker or someone with good command of spoken English to work with you on the following examples. Listen very hard for the differences and then try to pronounce them so that you can reflect the differences you heard.

• [Long vowels]
  Try these pairs: Keith and kiss, feast and fist.
  
• [R versus L]
  Try these pairs: liver and river, world and word, war and wall.
  
• [Th versus S]
  Try these pairs: face and faith, think and sink.
  
• [Missing counterpart; there is no v sound in Chinese]
  Try these: very and vibrate.
  

Unlearn these pronunciations that are due to the Pin-yin imprints. Pin-yin is the most common standard for representing Standard Mandarin in the Latin alphabet. The correspondence between letter and sound does not follow any single other language such as English. Many Chinese have to anglicize the Pin-yin alphabet in their early learning to pronounce words accurately in the English language.
For example: c as in cang and cong, q in qing and que, x as in xiang and xue, r as in ren and rang.

I found that the college-educated group manages well the different pronunciations in English and in the Chinese Pin-yin.