Differences in Pronunciation Evaluation

A Comparison of Evaluations by Japanese and Russian Speakers

Abstract

In this study, we asked twenty Japanese and twenty Russian teachers of Japanese, and twenty other native Japanese speakers, to evaluate the pronunciation of Russian-speaking learners of Japanese, and analyzed their evaluation criteria as well as their comments after evaluation. The results show that Japanese teachers displayed more critical evaluation vis-à-vis typical learners' pronunciations but were more lenient when Japanese allophones were observed. On the other hand, Russian teachers were more critical when evaluating pronunciation characteristics due to the influence of Russian stress accents or phones, but tended to be tolerant of pronunciations in which / N/ before a vowel is realized as [n], resulting in the loss of a mora, such as hono yomu (ほのよむ/honojomu/) instead of hon o yomu (ほんをよむ/hoN o jomu/).