Oh I’m more amused by the schools looking for “ESL” teachers that can’t put together coherent English in their job postings. “ESL” is what’s taught in English-speaking countries. There is a difference between that and “EFL”. To me, a marker of a terrible school is to use “ESL” to refer to an English program / their foreign English teacher, followed closely by terrible grammar and usage.
You have terrible spelling and grammar and you’re getting hired for a job as an “ESL” teacher here? It just shows how much of a clown show the entirely of English education is.
If it’s a classroom or I need to write something down, I always just write “lo” when they say “ello”. The letter “n”, I write “un” when they pronounce it that way. They learn REAL fast when words like “hello” are being spelled “heloloo”, because they know that’s not what the word looks like.
There’s a world of difference. Within the UK alone the accent variation is crazy. If I watch a local British tv show with my gf, she can barely understand half of it. And she is no English learning noob either.
I think Taiwanese typically follow l with a vowel sound. I don’t think they’re accustomed to using it on the end of a word without a following vowel.
I’m not in any way an expert on these things, but I think that Mandarin typically has three final consonants, which correspond to r, n, and ng in hanyu pinyin. In my (admittedly very limited) experience, Taiwanese Mandarin tends to treat the final ng as a final n, and tends to omit the final r.
An example about omitting the final r:
Once, when I was in an elevator here, someone asked me which floor I wanted. I guess I’d been daydreaming or something, or maybe, with my very limited Chinese, it took me a moment to process what he was asking me, because I paused, and uttered, “Uh,” which in English often indicates that I’m not sure what I’m going to say next. Before I could say anything else, in response to my uh, the person who had asked me which floor I wanted pressed the button which was numbered 2.
I now pronounce 二 like uh most of the time, if I remember to do it.
My Chinese knowledge is almost nonexistent–so bad, in fact, that I probably don’t have a right to an opinion about Chinese. But to the extent that I have any knowledge of these kinds of things, I like the Taiwanese version of Mandarin.
I’m nowhere near being competent to even learn from Princess Remy’s (黑米公主) podcasts, but I’ve downloaded them just in case I live long enough to get to that level.