That should probably be [ə ɑ ʦɛn] for SC (Southern Common) or [o ɑ ʨʲɛn] for NC (Northern Common), and I’ve definitely never heard [tsian] - where have you heard that? SC speakers don’t generally put the [i] or [ʲ] in any “-ian” syllables, so “lian” [lɛn], “bian” [bɛn], etc. The “o” is [o] in NC, while “oo” is [ɔ] (in all dialects, afaik). (Also a = ɑ.)
[quote=“hansioux”]For the initials, I think you could do another one clearing up the differences between b and p, by giving examples of the two with the same finals. For example, compare how 欲 beh and 伯 peh, 無 bô and 婆 pô, 茫 bâng and 縫 pâng are different. Same thing can be done for the g and k initials.
For English speakers at least, they are allophones and can be pretty discouraging to not be able to tell them apart. Many young Taiwanese these days tend to mix them up as well.[/quote]
This could definitely be a topic in a future video, along with g/k and the j sound in more detail. I’m not too concerned about the nitty gritty at the moment though, for the next ~dozen videos at least I want to keep going with a broader brush to get people the basics of pinyin, pronunciation, tones, and some sentence structure with common patterns/verbs/nouns/etc. I think going back to some of the details later on once a better foundation is there makes a lot of sense - not too late that it’s already fossilized, but not too early that it’s not useful. Personally, I found that it was much easier to practice my b’s and p’s once I was already speaking enough to have meaningful conversations and the enunciation of voicing/devoicing actually made a difference.
In general the reasoning for me doing these videos is that a lot of resources I saw were either too focused on some detail (like all the different pronunciations of a word in different areas, like in academic papers), or too generic (just listing sentences with no attention to detail on characters, pinyin, grammaticality, etc.), so I’m going for something that I hope is a bit more useful for learning the language in a more structured way.
This is the kind of stuff I’ve got planned so far, with the pronunciation series almost done (needs to be done first, for obvious reasons):
[ul]
[li]Pronunciation - Initials, finals, tones, sandhi (future would include stuff like b/p, g/k, j)[/li]
[li]Vocabulary - Numbers, places in Taiwan, food, etc.[/li]
[li]Grammar - tons of stuff here: parts of speech, sentence patterns, etc.[/li]
[li]Conversation - Short (scripted) conversations with local native speakers, with transcript/translation and commentary[/li][/ul]
I’m not sure what other people have used to learn Taiwanese, but it’s taken me years compared to Mandarin simply due to the dearth of resources and necessity of finding local people who are knowledgeable enough in the language to practice with, so I want to try to compile all that “experience” down to the important bits so other people can get up and running right away.
Not sure if you’re up for it, but if your Taiwanese is good enough to help me write/proofread scripts that would be excellent! 
(Also, I’ve been learning bits and pieces of Hakka for a short while now and would probably do something similar for that once my Hakka is “good enough,” probably in another few years though haha.)
