Foreword

Abstract

Just before summer, when the air around university is filled with students' adrenalin due to numerous tests, we are pleased to announce our summer ALA issue. It was compiled bearing in mind that the outcome of such efforts is mainly students' of course, however, ours also; the outcome of teachers and researchers. In a very broad sense, this issue places importance on a successful second language pedagogical process, be it readability, pronunciation, generalization and application of grammatical rules, or their methodological issues. It supports the idea that reciprocal improvements on students' as well as teachers' and researchers' sides undoubtedly deliver best results in the language pedagogy as well as in linguistic research. Improvements that build upon expertise and considerable amount of real-life data. Improvements aspired to.

Kristina HMELJAK SANGAWA in her article analized a collection of Japanese texts which had been linguistically simplified for learners of Japanese as a foreign language, and compared them to their original versions. The main aim of such analysis was to uncover different strategies that are used to make texts more accessible to learners. The author, however, makes some further steps and discusses the application of such strategies to assessing, selecting, and devising texts in a language classroom. 

Zuzana POSPĚCHOVÁ offers a detailed introduction to the method of prosodic transcription (PTR) for Standard Chinese established by phonetician Oldřich Švarný. The PTR method has taken several decades to form and it is nowadays a well established way of teaching Chinese prosody in the language courses around the Czech Republic. The article offers a short sample text, students' opinion on PTR, and an outline of the use of PTR in academic research. It concludes with the suggestion that PTR could be an international system of transcription capturing prosodic features worldwide.  

The idea in Mateja PETROVČIČ’s article also emerged from her experience with students of Chinese as a second language and their problems in the learning process. She highlights the so called liheci, a special type of Chinese polymorphemic verbs. Such verbs are known to sometimes accept one or more elements to infuse in between their morphemes, however, the author points out that word sketches such as Sketch Engine hardly offer any information on the behaviour of such words. She gives suggestions on how to include them.

Liulin ZHANG offers a discussion on the two commonly recognized imperfective aspect markers in Mandarin Chinese zai and着zhe, and argues their qualifications as imperfective aspect markers based on the differences in their origins, historical evolutions, and corpus data.

Alexander AKULOV is critical towards the methods in comparative linguistics that base on the characteristics of lexems of the compared languages. He points out that such methods do not suppose verification and therefore allow different, even opposing conclusions. In his article he suggests the comparison of grammars of the languages involved, and by using Prefixation Ability Index (PAI) and Verbal Grammar Correlation Index (VGCI) tackles the problem of Buyeo language group. His findings prove that Japanese and Korean belong to the same language group, and not just to the same language family.     

Finally, Pankaj DWIVEDI and Somdev KAR contributed a survey article on a Hindi dialect called Kanauji. The article exposes problems researchers have to deal with on the field when monitoring and documenting spoken language of a certain area, and fitting the findings into concepts such as a language and a dialect.