Czech Consonants and Their Realization by Vietnamese Speakers

Present diploma thesis deals with perceptively noticeable deviations in realization of consonants in Czech of Vietnamese native speakers. The aim of the thesis is identification, characterization, categorization and quantification of the deviations from common Czech pronunciation according to specific ways of realization. In the theoretical part the consonant systems of both the languages and their syllabic structures are compared contrastively. The following chapter is dedicated to a short analysis of the pronunciation exercises and their didactic contribution in the most frequently used textbooks of Czech as a foreign language. Moreover, a textbook designated for Vietnamese speakers and an English textbook were analyzed for a better comparison. The research itself is based on an analysis of 16 records of Vietnamese native speakers by a method of careful listening in Praat program. The results have shown that the most frequent deviations in the speech of Vietnamese speakers were caused by interference from their mother tongue, especially because of the different consonant systems of Czech and Vietnamese and their different phonotactic rules. Keywords: Czech as a foreign language, Vietnamese, pronunciation, consonants, phonetics, didactic