Abstract
The aim of this study is to clarify the phonetic features and problems of pronunciation of English and Japanese by Korean native speakers based on the results of listening and pronunciation tests. It is valuable to compare the English pronunciation of Korean speakers with their Japanese pronunciation from the viewpoint of a contrastive analysis of the English, Japanese and Korean languages, as well as to make an analysis using data obtained from both listening and pronunciation tests. Analysis of the data led to the following three conclusions: 1. There is much first language interference when learning a second language; 2. Such interference occurs when the first language differs from the second language not only on the phonological level but also on the phonetic level; 3. Even when the multiple second languages have identical or similar phonological and phonetic features, first language interference does not always occur.
