In the process of Chinese language teaching, we can find that the learners come from different countries have various problems in pronunciation. But we can summarize the features of the foreigners’ pronunciation with a Chinese adjective “yang qiang yang diao”. It means the learners who study in China articulate is not standard so that we can tell it is the foreign accent as we hear.

This kind of problem has become the most obvious one in pronunciation teaching and it need to be solved immediately. We all know that the accuracy of the pronunciation depends on the accuracy of the tone in certain degree. The tone can be the most important thing in the pronunciation. If the students who study Chinese have a right tone, it sounds fluently even though they articulate wrongly in specific syllables.

Generally there are many factors affect the accuracy of the pronunciation, among which the main two are age and mother tongue. Foreigners who learn Chinese language all know that there are 21 initial consonants, 39 simple or compound vowels and four tones. Some of them are lacking in other languages.

There are no vowels like “u” and “e” in Japanese language. Therefore, many Japanese students spend much time but fail to master them when they learn Mandarin. When articulating it, they usually replace them with the similar pronunciation in Japanese. It is difficult for English speakers to master the four tones because there are no tones in English.

The learners’ age is a very important factor that affects the Chinese language learning. The experts said that the age around 12 is the critical period of language learning. If they learn to speak Chinese at this time, they will acquire effectively or they will never have the language ability to learn foreign language as they learn the mother tongue.

However, most foreigners who come to learn Chinese in China are all adults. They have missed the critical period of learning language and their pronunciation habits have formed. In this case, if the target language has different pronunciation habits with their mother tongue, it will be very difficult for them to adjust to the pronunciation in the target language.

We can tell the Chinese language pronunciation is from the Chinese people or the foreigners as soon as we hear it because the age and their mother tongues affect their pronunciation in Chinese language learning.