Education minister backs teaching romanization for Taiwanese

Language Taiwanese and Hakka Corner
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[quote=“enzo+”]Any transcription of Taiwanese would have to be designed with local kids in mind, not foreigners, because it’s the kids who have to learn Taiwanese.

So IMHO it would be best to stick with what they know best: the bopomofo system, updated with new signs if the existing system is not enough to show all Taiwanese sounds.

It sounds crazy to me that a Taiwanese kid should first learn a foreign alphabet before he can learn what should be his own language.

I say, go with bopomofo for the kids, and then go with adapted Chinese characters for adults. Many Taiwanese words are now already written with Chinese characters of their own, and if you go to Xinzhu County, you’ll even find Hakka inscriptions written with Chinese characters.

The whole point about writing Taiwanese is not to score ideological points, it’s to promote the language, so what’s most practical should prevail.[/quote]

This keeps popping up. Who is trying to score ideological points?

Besides, believe me no one is considering foreigners here. The whole point is a system to be taught in schools and to eventually see more common usage.

A bopomo system would be fine, but a romanization would be just as good. kids will not magically be able to use the bopomo signs for taiwanese. there are considerable differences. in fact, many such bopomo based systems have been created. the key thing is the benefit of a mixed system. now that one is being advanced, the last thing anyone needs is nitpicking about it. that’s what you’ll get though, from all kinds of people who have this or that opinion, without any major interest in taiwanese or its writing.

do you have any idea how many additional characters will be needed enzo? not to mention loan words which will need some kind of phonetic. that a few inscriptions of dialects exist in characters is hardly germane. could it be done? sure. will it? not a chance. practical? you must be joking.

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I’d actually prefer complete romanization. It’s what I’m using now to learn Taiwanese, and it works great. I wish I had learned Mandarin this way.

But it’s not politically feasible to go to a completely romanized orthography. The great thing about the mixed system is that it could function as a kind of trojan horse to get romanization taught in the schools.

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Aboriginal influences like what, for example? Japanese influences (actually mostly English) like bakku (back up), tomato, banana, ladio (radio), gasu (gas), anata (you) and the word for “hostpital”…the list seems rather short. Actually there are lots of Japanese loan words in Mandarin.

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Aboriginal influences like what, for example? Japanese influences (actually mostly English) like bakku (back up), tomato, banana, ladio (radio), gasu (gas), anata (you) and the word for “hostpital”…the list seems rather short. Actually there are lots of Japanese loan words in Mandarin.[/quote]

there are some, i have a list somewhere. there are quite a few japanese words. many other differences in usage have crept up over the years due to the long seperation. i would consider taiwanese as one dialect of minnan.

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Okay there a movement to use a South Korean Looking system to write Taiwanese. There is a movement to use romanization to write Taiwanese.

Is there any reason whatsoever not to treat Taiwanese as a dialect of Chinese? Other dialects of Chinese are able to adapt the current characters sets and modify them to their needs.

Cantonese is probably the most often used because of HK. I’ve seen Shanghaiese use their own sets and every now and then I see Taiwanese using their own sets.

To go off and make a radically different way of writing taiwanese just seems like re-inventing the wheel at this time.

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FYI, there is a 5-page thread about this topic from two years ago.
[url=http://tw.forumosa.com/t/should-taiwanese-kids-be-learning-how-to-spell-in-taiwanese/2640/1 Taiwanese kids be learning how to spell in Taiwanese?[/url]

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Phonetic writing is hardly reinventing the wheel or radical. It is used widely throughout Asia. Chinese has phonetic systems and the use of phonetic writing for it has been considered in the past.

Character sets exist for Taiwanese, but this plainly is not Hong Kong. School children certainly do not have the time to learn the large number of additional characters required. Adults do not have the inclination. It is not going to happen, except in the dreams of purists and the rantings of those with ulterior motives.

Phonetic writing has been used for Taiwanese for many years, again hardly reinventing the wheel.

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In ten, twenty years from now, will we be seeing romanized ‘Taiwanese’ in general usage? No. People will be using regular Chinese characters for Taiwanese words as they do today. The reason is that Chinese characters work just fine. There’s simply no need to have a romanized system for Taiwanese.

Examples: when people go to KTV and sing a Taiwanese song, the lyrics at the bottom of the screen are in Chinese characters.
On restaurant menus, food items which only have a Taiwanese name are written in Chinese (The ‘A’ in ‘A tsai4’ excepted).
In newspapers and magazines, Taiwanese words and phrases are written in Chinese characters without any problems.

In short, it’s going to be a tough sell to get the average Taiwanese to actually use romanization when they don’t want, or need to use it. So it’s reasonable to ask what is the point of requiring kids to learn it at school?

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I thought the govt proposal was a modified, systematized form of the mixed system.

I don’t think ANY of this stuff should be required in school. Parents should be able to choose what languages their children learn. And if a language scheme can’t succeed without govt coercion, then boo hoo.

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[quote=“Spack”]
Examples: when people go to KTV and sing a Taiwanese song, the lyrics at the bottom of the screen are in Chinese characters.
On restaurant menus, food items which only have a Taiwanese name are written in Chinese (The ‘A’ in ‘A tsai4’ excepted).
In newspapers and magazines, Taiwanese words and phrases are written in Chinese characters without any problems.

In short, it’s going to be a tough sell to get the average Taiwanese to actually use romanization when they don’t want, or need to use it. So it’s reasonable to ask what is the point of requiring kids to learn it at school?[/quote]

This is wrong.

take the KTV. the characters are a mash of accepted taiwanese characters and mandarin sound and meaning loans that couldn’t be used for any communication beyond “gua lim chui, gua ai li” in a drunken KTV’ers wildest dream. the newspapers are known for this as well. long meaningful conversations consisting of lists of meals will be a possibility, i grant you.

there are a great mass of common taiwanese words for which accepted characters simply do not exist–and never have existed.

the point of using romanization alongside characters–is that anyone will be able to write any taiwanese word they want and know the reader will understand it. they do not have that now. if you think it’s important to have a taiwanese writing system then the benefit of that should be obvious. teach the kids at school during their hour of taiwanese and they WILL be able to write anything in taiwanese they want, and it will be understood. go out on the street and talk to a hundred people and see how many of them could do that now. i think you will find the phrase “just fine” is not quite suitable. you may be having a few problems there.

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[quote=“Screaming Jesus”]

I don’t think ANY of this stuff should be required in school. Parents should be able to choose what languages their children learn. And if a language scheme can’t succeed without govt coercion, then boo hoo.[/quote]

languages shouldn’t be taught in school?

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daltongang,

What is your motivation to the romanization of Taiwanese. Seems a little suspicious.

You would have to go above these people taioanji.com
These people are trying to sell me the klingon writing system for Taiwanese. They would probably be more successful because they actually address some issues native chinese speakers would have with a new system.

But still a hard sell in my opinion. Because you’re going to need to convince people who are literate in Chinese characters to adopt a phonetically base system for a dialect of Chinese. Which in most people minds is to just create some other character based on using the 6 types of Chinese Characters.

In the mind of a literate Chinese people any phonetic form of Chinese is only a learning tool. Unlike Japanese and Korean that evolved their phonetic systems into wide use. And even among Japanese and Korean erudition is proportional to Chinese Character recognition.

This is just one of the many cultural barriers I see to a phonetic base system at this time.

Learning a few new characters for someone who is already literate in Chinese characters is a lot easier than learning something based on a foriegn language.

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That you find common sense suspicious is not particularly surprising AC.

You are wrong. Learning a phonetic system will be much easier for children than learning ANOTHER seperate set of characters–nothing like a “few” more by the way–and the knowledge will be much more easily retained. With much less effort they will have acquired the ability to write in Taiwanese.

If the phonetic system would use–gasp–those nasty foreign Roman letters–no one here knows how to make heads or tails of them huh?–that would not make it “based on a foreign language”. It would simply be a phonetic symbol for the transcription of taiwanese. Romanization already has a long history of usage in this capacity.

If you have not noticed adults are not clamoring for ANY form of Taiwanese writing. Debating whether characters romanization or even heiroglyphics would be more acceptable to them is as pointless as asking if eskimos would prefer little ice cubes with the holes in them to big solid ones. The point is a system that school children could learn with relatively minimal effort, and the mixed system is exactly that.

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Daltongang:

I think we should distinguish between several strata of languages. At the top are English and Mandarin, whose usefulness is obvious to everybody. I’m a fan of home-schooling so I don’t know whether I would “require” such things of everybody, but if I were a Taiwanese and it were my kid, sure.

Then come languages which are somewhat useful here, or potentially useful, like Taiwanese or German or Japanese or Bahasa Indonesia. If the schools can offer any of these, then that’s great, but I wouldn’t require them by name. If it were my kid, I’d be inclined to let them pick their number three language, so long as it seemed vaguely condusive to their education.

Finally, at the bottom, come mostly useless language projects like the government-created Taiwanese script. Unfortunately, the government wants to force children to devote attention to Taiwanese, including this written form, at the expense of more useful language activities. An overseas parallel would be Malaysia’s decision to educate Malay children in Malay rather than English–good for nationalism, bad for business.

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We’re not talking about the government of Taiwan forcing people to study the language of the ancient Navajo. The government is introducing classes (for just a couple hours a week) that will help students become literate in what for most of them is their mother tongue. I cannot for the life of me understand what you think is wrong with that.

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What about those Taiwanese where Minnan is not their mother tongue.

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[quote=“Screaming Jesus”]
Then come languages which are somewhat useful here, or potentially useful, like Taiwanese or German or Japanese or Bahasa Indonesia. [/quote]

That’s the stupidest thing I’ve seen on this thread. This… is… Taiwan.

What about the people whose mother tongue is not mandarin AC?

in my opinion all this is off topic. Whether Taiwanese should be taught in schools or not does not seem germane to this thread.

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It’s a bit like trying to get people to become literate in sign language. (Think about it.) There’s no earthly reason why these kids would need to read Taiwanese, particularly not in a script the government just made up themselves. This doesn’t add any educational benefit. I mean, what are they after–ability to read storefront signs? The Presbyterian prayerbook? What? Now spoken Taiwanese would be useful, though not so much so that it deserves to be mandatory.

Also, the government is not only “introducing” classes but for at least some students, requiring those classes.

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[quote=“Screaming Jesus”]There’s no earthly reason why these kids would need to read Taiwanese.[/quote]There is if you want to completely replace evil commie Mandarin with Taiwanese, even the DPP now realises it’s not much use as a language if you can’t write it down. Your mother tongue is Taiwanese no matter what your first language is.

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There’s no need to write a language? That’s crazy.

first of all, if you are going to teach children to speak a language, as you say is valid above, why NOT teach them to write it at the same time? Not only will they be learning the language in an integrated fashion, and be able to make notes in it, etc etc etc etc etc, but they will also be learning to write instead of just speak. they would also be able to do it with quite minimal effort as learning a phonetic system is not very difficult. they would then have a very useful tool for all their future efforts to learn taiwanese. educationally speaking, this is a no brainer. i don’t get your point at all.

second, have you ever written a letter? a short story? etc etc etc etc. these are just some of the things that you can actually do in a language when you can write it. why bother though, huh? what a waste of time.