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itive transfer and negative transfer. According to the definition of positive transfer, it is helpful to understand and command another kind of language study, especially when both the first language and the second language have something in common in certain aspects. For example, learning to read in Spanish will facilitate the ability to learn to read in English for an individual who speaks Spanish and is learning English. Oppositely, negative transfer, which is the interference of the first language in the second language learning, has the negative effect to another kind of study. It usually impedes language learning and leads to some errors. The more differences there are between these two languages, the greater influence it will have.The number of learning English as a foreign language (EFL) students has been increasing dramatically in schools in China in recent years. Most of the Chinese students learn English as one of their basic courses in school, it is inevitable that their learning will be influenced by their mother tongue.For Chinese EFL learners, language transfer widely exists in the process of learning and causes them to project the features of their own language onto the target language. As they cannot easily get rid of the interference of their mother tongue, they learn English passively and still keep the same language habits and the Chinese way of thinking while learning, resulting in some common errors or sometimes the existence of the so-called Chinglish.For example, if one has developed good reading skills in Chinese, he is likely to be able to apply these skills when reading English (One useful reading skill is the ability to guess the meaning of unfamiliar words from context. Another one is the ability to decide which new words in a text are important to look up in the dictionary and which words can safely be ignored.). The level of proficiency reached in the first language influences the development of their proficiency in the second language. Many Chinese EFL learners can’t help to relate their phonetics knowledge of the mother tongue to that in English, trying to find some similarities of them in order to learn and master English phonetics in the process of learning, as some of the pronunciations of Chinese phonetic symbols are surprisingly similar to their English counterparts. [3] And this reflects the positive transfer in the second language learning. However, many of the English phonetics sounds fail to find their Chinese counterparts, such as /ð/. So when those learners who are lack of strict pronunciation imitation or training usually come across some blockings in English pronunciation they are very likely to find some similar phonetic sounds in their mother tongue as substitutes, henceforth, causing the pronunciation deviation and pronunciation errors, which reflects the negative transfer in the process of the second language learning. As negative transfer is caused by the differences in these two languages, this paper will mainly discuss the negative influence of the Chinese sound system on English pronunciation of Chinese students on the theory of negative language transfer.3.Contrastive analysis of Mandarin Chinese and English Sound SystemEnglish and Chinese belong to two language systems with significant differences. English is a Germanic Language of the Indo-European Family, while Chinese to the Sino-Tibetan language family. They share many similarities. As spoken Chinese comprises many region