Anyone learning Taiwanese? (Native speakers welcome, too)

Do they use tailo?

Which ones? They look good to me except 伊 完成 。which definitely wouldn’t occur to me. I’d like to see the whole first bit too, maybe I’ll try to strip them out somehow!

Both, and honestly the conversion is so easy you can memorize it in 20 seconds:

  • ts → ch
  • ua/ue → oa/oe
  • ik/ing → ek/eng
  • oo → o͘
  • nn → ⁿ

Congratulations, you now know Pehoeji :rofl:

Just to clarify, I don’t think any of them are “bad” per se except 伊完成 which is ungrammatical, but some native speakers might say that there is a more authentic way to say these, e.g., that a fully native Taioanese speaker without heavy Mandarin influence might prefer.

  • 好猶未 ? → Possibly OK, hard to say without context
  • 按怎 ? → Generally seems awkward to me used “alone”, I believe it requires a context
  • 幾點矣 ? → Chit-má kúi tiám / Chín kúi tiám
  • 伊完成。 X → I (verb) soah ·a.
  • 你好無 ? → Chia̍h pá ·bōe? (I would say this is the “most” problematic after the one just above; Amá is not going to say “Lí hó ·bô”, it’s just a direct translation from Mandarin 你好嗎)

Even if they’re fine, a 20% ungrammatical rate on basic 2 word sentences is pretty rough for a learner.

I tried it when I first got to Taiwan and gave up because it really just throws you in there without any way to correct your pronunciation or tones. (IMO it’s the biggest problem with Glossika no matter how much you buy into their ‘natural language learning’ stuff… but I digress.) Now that I’ve been exposed to Taigi and know the tones/pronunciation I find it much less useful than, say, going to my local 菜市仔.

Channel 14 台語台 has 台文 subtitles, never noticed before.

Technically, their subtitles are “臺閩文”, which is a version of writing made up and promoted by the ROC Ministry of Education since approx 2006. (Their own resources refer to it as such, and never as 台文, so this is not something I’m just making up.) Unfortunately, due to general lack of awareness / education in this area, most people can’t tell the difference. Older native Taioanese speakers generally don’t understand much of 臺閩文 as many characters are Chinese (taken from Cantonese, Shanghainese, etc.), and were not historically used in Taioanese. This is also very confusing to younger, not-as-native speakers.

台文 uses a fairly different character set and “character choosing” mechanism (almost strictly sound loans), and a slightly different romanization (Pe̍h-ōe-jī). Most 民間 works (regardless of time period) are written in 台文, but the ROC MOE refuses to acknowledge its existence.

Yeah, it’s all 台文 to me :man_shrugging: Was used to it already like 20 years ago I guess. There was this newsletter, tai-bun hsin-bun I think it was called. I took some classes with them, they were pretty hardcore green as you can imagine!

I like channel 14.

@greves a few years ago I saw a book for learning Taiwanese that used a modified form of hanyu pinyin for romanization, but didn’t buy it. I now wish I had bought it just because I think it is an interesting way for those who have already learnt mandarin to pronounce Taiwanese words. Unfortunately I haven’t been able to find it since. Do you know of any website or book that offers Taiwanese with hanyu pinyin style romanization?

Cool

Given that there are a fair number of sounds in Tâi that don’t exist in Mandarin, these kinds of phengim are all heavily modified. I am kind of a broken record on this topic, but just learn Lômájī. If you go with some obscure phengim system now, you’ll have to learn Lômájī later anyway to read anything, since that’s what the vast majority of Tâi content is written in.

(And to answer your question: no, except maybe various obscure blogs and stuff, which goes to my point about most works already being in the standard Lômájī.)

奇蹟的女兒 on channel 14 is a pretty good soap, period piece. Dark

Got this from one of @greves videos. I think I changed the 2nd tone from 好好 to 苦苦. I’m terrible at tonal sandhi but this table really helped me out.

edit: I decided to change example word for tone 3 and 8 to more negative words to go along with the theme.

1
陰平
2
陰上
3
陰去
4
陰入
5
陽平
6
陽上
7
陽去
8
陰入
-ptk -h -ptk -h
Oo-oo烏烏 khóo-khóo苦苦 tshàu-tshàu臭臭 siap-siap澀澀 phoh-phoh粕粕 tâm-tâm澹澹 bān-bān慢慢 ku̍t-ku̍t滑滑 po̍h-po̍h薄薄

@greves hasn’t posted since 2021. At least we still get to see him interviewed once in a while. Congrats on the second kid.

Born in Taipei, Taiwanese was my first language. This guy’s vocabulary and conversational skills exceeds mine. Trippy

Taigi isn’t a easy language to learn. Between the tonal sandhi and multiple ways to read a character, I absolutely agree it’s much better to learn Taigi only in Lomaji and gain fluency first. Since there has been near zero Taigi education for at least 4 to 5 generation of Taiwanese people, the rapid loss of Taigi is just shocking but predictable. If people didn’t learn Mandarin in school, like many Taiwanese Americans, say Jeremy Lin for example, how well could their Mandarin be? It’s just that Jeremy Lin grew up in the US and didn’t have a Mandarin speaking environment to learn Mandarin. We grew up in Taiwan and didn’t have a Taiwanese speaking environment to learn Taigi.

I went to the states at the age of 2. My mandarin might be better than my taigi since I studied a couple years of mandarin in undergrad with one year Cantonese for the traditional characters. Sad to think my first language will die out over generations

It will likely die in one generation.

Musical terms in Taigi.