The book Praktická korpusová lingvistika - čínština (Practical Corpus Linguistics - Chinese) by Ľuboš Gajdoš provides insight into the use of Chinese corpora from a user-oriented viewpoint and is an ...invaluable resource for anyone who wants to gain a better understanding of the Chinese language. It introduces the key concepts and categories of Chinese grammar and corpus linguistics, and systematically guides the user from the basics to the intermediate use of corpora in both language learning and research. As a systematic step-by-step guide, it is highly recommended for readers with prior knowledge of Chinese, as well as for beginners and intermediate users in the field of corpus linguistics.
Idiomatic expressions play an important role in communication. They are widely used in both spoken and written discourse and are often one of the indicators of native-like proficiency. This paper ...discusses Chinese idioms chengyu in foreign language education, presents some observations regarding the scope of idioms predicted for the advanced level of Chinese, and introduces conceptual gaps between L1 and L2 as possible reasons for learners’ mistaken usages. This study argues that equipping students with skills and knowledge needed for reaching contextually appropriate use of idioms should be the main goal in the teaching/learning process and provides a set of practical suggestions as to which aspects of teaching idioms should be considered thoroughly.
The coronavirus pandemic has changed our lives dramatically and caused much fear around the world. While social media can contribute to faster information flow, this environment also gives rise to ...intensifying anxiety. This paper examines the research questions of how the Chinese National Commission (NHC), as the main authority for the health-related issues, presents the news about COVID-19 pandemic to English-speaking readers, which topics related to the coronavirus are stressed most, and what reporting strategies are used in presenting the current events and issues. The results indicate that the authorities are well-informed about the dynamics of public attention, since the same dynamics can be observed in the amount and structure of news. Moreover, from the perspective of reporting strategies we can see that the authorities subtly follow all the criteria that were proposed to allay fears and slow down or break the spiral of negativism with regard to the pandemic.
Članek obravnava soglasnike standardne kitajščine z vidika govorca slovenskega jezika. Slovenščina ima 21 pomensko razločevalnih soglasnikov, kitajščina enega več. Ker se fonetične značilnosti ...soglasnikov med jezikoma razlikujejo, prispevek prouči možnosti, kako s slovenskimi glasovi predstaviti kitajske foneme, pri čemer upoštevamo tudi načelo gospodarnosti. V ta namen najprej podamo oris slovenskih in kitajskih soglasnikov, jih primerjamo s pomočjo mednarodne fonetične abecede, predlagamo ustreznice in predlagane rešitve strnemo v krajše navodilo, kako naj slovenski bralec izgovarja kitajske soglasnike.
This paper presents the position of Chinese in Slovene educational system. In most European countries, including Slovenia, the first foreign language is introduced in the lower grades of primary ...education, and the second foreign language as a compulsory subject is added a few years later, when students enter upper secondary education (ISCED 3). At the same time, the third foreign language may be added to the regular courses. Schools choose languages from a set list, and Chinese is one of the languages that can be taught at the ISCED 3 level. It is not available as second foreign language yet, but Chinese can be selected as a third foreign language. Recently, new initiatives have emerged to endorse Chinese as a second foreign language. The last part of the paper briefly highlights language curricula within the gimnazija programs and proposes the renewal of Chinese curriculum with four modules that provide horizontal and vertical continuity from ISCED 2 to ISCED 6.
Separable words (liheci) are a special type of Chinese verbs with unique syntactical features in a sense that some elements come in between the two morphemes of a verb for a sentence to be ...grammatically acceptable. Not all separable words are extendable to the same degree. To understand the behaviour of words, it is generally advised to check word sketches, because they are based on large text corpora. This article examines how Chinese separable words are treated in Sketch Engine and discusses on the approprietness of the available Chinese corpora for word sketches. It further stresses the importance of including information on inserted elements in word sketches and gives suggestions on how to include them.
Five Stroke “Wubi Hua” is an input method, based on the stroke shape and stroke order of a character, and requires only 5 keys from 1 to 5 on numerical keypad to input every character. As an input ...method for Chinese, it is already integrated in Mac OS X, and is available as part of different applications for Windows OS. Although stroke order in Chinese and Japanese is different to some extent, this input method can be applied to characters of both writing systems.
Since the Five Stroke input method is easily accessible, simple to master and is not pronunciation-based, we would expect that the students will use it to input unknown characters. The survey comprises students of Japanology and Sinology at Department of Asian and African Studies, takes in consideration the grade of the respondent and therefore his/her knowledge of characters. This paper also discusses the impact of typeface to the accuracy of the input.
In Slovene, sound shapes of Japanese and Chinese words undergoing the process of assimilation may be quite different from their origins, which in the end should not come as a surprise as it is so in ...many other languages. However, the fact that there are many cases with two slightly different Slovene pronunciations of the same Japanese or Chinese word, of which one is closer to the original sound shape than the other, calls for a more comprehensive investigation on the factors that contributed to such a result. This research pays attention to vowel sequences in Japanese and Chinese, and how they appear in Slovene as the so called visiting lexica. Though the two languages carry out vowel sequences in different ways, similarities can be found in the way Slovene detects and resolves their vowel hiatuses. Authors stress the importance of metrical aspects of the original sound shapes, which Latin script includes inconsistently or does not express at all. Phonological approach to vowel sequences solution to vowel hiatus and offers systematic guidelines on pronunciation of the Latin script. Besides, it may further bring some new insights into possible solution on conjugation and declination forms of Japanese and Chinese loanwords in Slovene.
The aim of the article is to introduce the corpus of Chinese literary texts and to describe the process and design principles behind the corpus construction. The authors provide information regarding ...the reasoning behind the chosen structure and annotation of the corpus, and further discuss possibilities the corpus opens for linguistic research and language learning. The article provides several examples of how the corpus can be used at various levels of language research.
Chinese language has changed drastically in the recent century. Papers on the language development mainly stress four big events in the Chinese history that imposed changes in language, i.e. The May ...Fourth Movement (1919), establishment of the People’s Republic of China (1949), Cultural Revolution (1966), and China’s reform and opening (1978). According to the features of recent neologisms, we suggest that the widening gap between rich and poor should be considered as the fifth milestone for changes in Chinese language.