Taiwanese

If there is one thing you should get right from the beginning, it's the pronunciation of the language.

I prefer Pe̍h-ōe-jī (POJ) as the script. It does a good enough job representing sounds and it is the most widespread system, even though this doesn't mean much in a language that doesn't have a solid written tradition. Not to mention that every textbook author feels entitled to create his or her own systems.

Much of this section is based on ニューエクスプレス台湾語 by 村上嘉英.

Taiwanese has 6 vowels and 17 consonants.

All of these sounds are allowed to appear at the beginning of a Taiwanese syllable. Vowels on their own are valid syllables too.

There are 8 diphthongs and 2 triphthongs.

These sounds can appear at the end of syllables, sometimes followed by a final consonant or a nasal sound. They are valid syllables on their own, too.

There are 7 consonant endings: 3 nasals and 4 plosives.

This is one of the most difficult parts of Taiwanese.

There are 7 tones (historically 8, but now the 6th tone is the same as the 2nd tone). Every syllable has a tone of its own, but due to a phenomenon called tone sandhi, you must pronounce a syllable with an altered tone if it is not the final syllable of your uttering, which is most of the time.

Tones 4 and 8 only occur in syllables with stop endings -p, -t, -k, -h.

Pe̍h-ōe-jī, the Taiwanese script preferred in this wiki, was created by Western missionaries in the 19th century. It is, by far, the most widely used Taiwanese script.

Pe̍h-ōe-jī was designed so that each symbol corresponds, with few exceptions, to one sound. In Pe̍h-ōe-jī, a symbol can be comprised by one up to three letters (chh).

Demonstratives are words that “point” to things, such as “this”, “that”, “those”, etc.

The following table sums up demonstratives in Taiwanese:

It is worth mentioning that the adverbs of place in Taiwanese are chia (此, here) and hia (彼, there), so there is an interesting regularity among these words that should make them fairly easy to remember.

When che and he are the subjects of a sentence, they are read in their original first tone, unaffected by tone sandhi.

These are the personal pronouns in Taiwanese:

Both gún and lán mean “we”, but gún excludes the person being spoken to and thus it's called “exclusive we”, while lán includes the person being spoken to and thus it's called “inclusive we”.

There are no gender distinctions for any of these pronouns. All of them can be used to refer to males or females.

I'll mention these regularities since they might help memorization:

• All first and second person pronouns are tone 2, while all third person pronouns are tone 1.
• Roughly, the plural is formed by adding a letter n to the singular.

sī (是) translates to the English verb to be.

The negation of sī is m̄-sī.

ah m̄-sī sī–bô

(p. 48 台湾語会話)

Both ē-sái and ē-tàng mean being able to.

ē-sái expresses that circumstances allow for something, while ē-tàng expresses that authorization exists to do something. Not all speakers do this distinction, though.

The negation of these expressions are bē-sái and bē-tàng.

When politely requesting authorization, use kám ē-sái.

Notes: notice 11 is cha̍p-it even though 1 is chi̍t, and 12 is cha̍p-jī even though 2 is nn̄g. Notice, too, that that 20 is jī-cha̍p even though 2 is nn̄g.

Notes: notice that 20 is jī-cha̍p even though 2 is nn̄g. Otherwise, all multiples of ten are regular.

Taiwanese textbooks published in Taiwan aren't very good - that has been my unfortunate experience, at least. Textbooks intended for teaching Taiwanese at school seem to be the less suited for foreign learners of the language, since they use characters only and no indication of pronunciation - teachers are expected to fill them in, after all. Taiwanese books published in Japan are much better, so it's a shame that using them requires a knowledge of Japanese and, if you live outside Japan, paying high shipping costs.

Most material on this page is based on the following books:

In Japanese:

• ニューエクスプレス台湾語 by 村上嘉英.　白水社, 2010. 144pp.
• 台湾語会話 by 樋口　靖. 東方書店, 2004. 317pp.
• トラベル台湾語 by 近藤　綾　and 溫浩邦. 日中出版, 2007. 185pp.
• やさしい台湾語カタコト会話帳 by 趙怡華. すばる舎, 2008. 159pp.
• 台湾語会話フレーズブック by 趙怡華. 明日香出版社, 2010. 421pp.
• 絵でわかる台湾語会話 by 趙怡華. 明日香出版社, 2007. 237pp.
• はじめての台湾語 by 趙怡華. 明日香出版社, 2008. 205pp.
• 台湾語基本単語2000 by 鄭正浩. 株式会社語研, 2008. 220pp.

In Chinese:

• Tâi-gí Pe̍h-ōe Sió Sû-tián, TJ's Dictionary of Non-literary Taiwanese, TJ台語白話小詞典 by 張裕宏 Tiuⁿ-Jūhông. 亞細亞國際傳播社, 2009. 588pp.
• 台語入門新階 by 王華南. 臺原出版社, 1998. 271pp.
• 即學即用臺語台語會話 by 吳宏逸. 萬人出版社, 2009. 103pp.
• 大家來學台語 by 胡美津. 統一出版社, 2010. 223pp.
• 生活台語會話 by 林仙台. 萬人出版社, 2009. 90pp.

In German:

• Taiwanisch Wort für Wort by Katharina Sommer and Xie Shu-Kai. Reise Know-How Verlag, 2004. 160pp.

It turns out I don't have any books in English. However, there is a nice list you can refer to at tailingua.com.

1. Spoken only. Few written materials. Unnatural to read. However, I learn better by reading and it’s hard to follow spoken materials.
2. Written materials don’t cover conversation anyway.
3. Scarcity of materials.
4. Similar words in Mandarin fool me into thinking Taiwanese won’t be that difficult.
5. Multiple transliteration schemes.
6. Nobody to speak it with. Learning passive skills only is difficult.
7. Many tones and massive tone changes.
8. No gradual method of learning the language that I know of. It seems to be all or nothing.
9. I’m not in Taiwan.
10. I don’t really like the language.
11. All materials simply show samples of the language out of which I’m supposed to make sense. No explanations.
12. I can’t get used to the fact that there is much from Taiwanese that I have to learn from scratch.
13. I’m not used to learning a analytical, monosyllabic, tonal language from scratch.
14. No inexhaustible source from which to learn and practice the language pleasurably if I ever become proficient at it.
15. Many people who speak it are bilingual anyway. No feeling of “conquer the language and you will conquer the culture/country”. Can’t attach the language to the country as much as, say, French can be attached to France. Seems important but not indispensable to understanding Taiwan.
16. Having listened to my language all my life without learning much doesn’t make me feel better.
17. Why do I want to learn the language anyway? There isn’t much to do in it, except for eavesdropping in my parents’ conversation, which I rarely get to hear nowadays.
18. It’s hard to convince myself that the words I read are actual words that evoke the meaning they are supposed to evoke. Can’t get used to the sounds.
19. No standardized character representation. Taiwanese written with characters looks like gibberish.

1. The challenge.
2. What I’ll learn about learning languages through learning Taiwanese.
3. Language as an act of faith: I won’t know what the language is good for until I actually learn it.
4. Maybe I’m just disappointed because I still don’t know enough of the language.