Foreword

Abstract

Education is a medium of subject-matter instruction that has shown a constant evolution. In a second or “foreign” language field, it boasts close to countless combinations of a target and source language or dialect and characteristics of each individual who participates in the process, as well as all direct and indirect learning material adding to this abundance. Though having narrowed the scope of the winter ALA issue to no more than two languages, namely Japanese and Chinese in focus, a great variety of the articles nevertheless demonstrate a great variety of perceived problems and methodological approaches used to solve them. What is more, this issue also contains reviews of two new publications, yet another tool for the more advanced acquisition of the Japanese and Chinese languages respectively. We hereby express our gratitude to every single contributor to this issue, not leaving out the reviewers and others involved in the publication. This issue opens with the article “The Role of Prototypical Transitivity in the Selection of Accusative Case Particle wo by Persian Learners of L2 Japanese” written by Anubhuti CHAUHAN and Ayat HOSSEINI. In the article, the authors focused on the selection pattern of the Japanese case particle wo by Persian-speaking learners to find out that learners were, in a specific way, sensitive to the degree of predicate transitivity and that learners’ particle selection strategy is influenced by proficiency level. The article “Understanding Vocabulary of L2 Learners of Japanese” by Nagisa MORITOKI ŠKOF investigated the effectiveness of reading skills by L2 learners of Japanese from the “Reading corpus of non-native speakers of Japanese” and concluded on the types of strategies non-kanji native speakers use to grasp the meanings of individual words, sentences, or whole texts. CHEW Fong Peng wrote the article “Relationship Between Attitude, Learning Orientation, Motivation, and Proficiency Degree of the Chinese Language Among Trainee Teachers”, in which she briefly introduced the consolidating position of the Chinese language in Malaysia, and looked into motivational intensity and its incentives among Malaysian trainee teachers of the Chinese language. The following article “Mitigation Strategies in Semi-structured Oral Chinese Interviews”, written by Maria QUEROL-BATALLER conducted research on the communicative style in Chinese. By using semi-structured oral interviews from the C-ORAL-CHINA corpus she identified and accounted for the strategic mechanisms through which mitigation is carried out by native Chinese speakers. Yet another article with an inviting topic “Harry Potter Movies and Borrowing Neologisms in Chinese” was written by Michaela FRYDRYCHOVÁ. The article is a lexicological analysis of the neologisms that occurred in Harry Potter films and in it, the author defined loanword categories that were used for borrowing neologisms from English to Chinese, and assessed their productivity. Last but not least are the two book reviews. First, Chikako SHIGEMORI BUČAR reviewed the dictionary “Großes japanisch-deutsches Wörterbuch” by Stalph J. et al. (2022), in her words a remarkable achievement as, besides offering word searches, it is an excellent reference for researchers and students on Japan. In the second book review, Mateja PETROVČIČ evaluated a book entitled “Praktická korpusová lingvistika – čínsky jazyk” written by Ľuboša Gajdoša and published in 2022. The book was described as a systematic step-by-step guide to understanding the Chinese language and is recommended for readers with prior knowledge of Chinese, as well as for beginners and intermediate users in the field of corpus linguistics. Editors and Editorial board wish the regular and new readers of the ALA journal a pleasant read full of inspiration, and a rise of new research ideas inspired by these papers. Editors