- Joined
- Apr 23, 2011
- Member Type
- Student or Learner
- Native Language
- Chinese
- Home Country
- Malaysia
- Current Location
- Malaysia
I do not claim to be an expert in either spoken Latin or in Mandarin phonology.
However, my memory from my time in China is that the /ŋ/ sound I heard there is very similar to my /ŋ/. My /g/ and /k/ are not exactly the same as the Mandarin equivalents, but the Mandarin sounds are velar. None of my Chinese students had any problems with these sounds.
A little hunting on the internet turned up several interesting sites, including:
inogolo - Pronunciation of Beijing : How to pronounce Beijing
and
Chinese Pronunciation - A, O, E with G, K, H » ChinesePod .
So, I don't really understand your difficulty with the English sounds.
I also do not claim to be an expert in phonetics. However I have looked through the British books on phonetics and phonology I possess (by Abercrombie, Ashby, Collins & Mees, Cruttenden, Gimson, Jones, Ladefoged, O’Connor, Roach and Wells) and can find nothing about the tongue not being supposed to make a contact with the roof of the mouth. Indeed, Gimson’s (my emphasis added) “The primary obstacle to the air-stream is formed by a closure made between the back of the tongue and the soft palate” is fairly typical of what is written about the velars.
It is possible that you have not remembered correctly the words in your book.
well, first of all, the word *beijing* they pronounce is different from what I used to hear.(what they pronounce is what we normally say) By the way, when they say the word *beijing*, they do have some accents especially the caucasian.