As my post on learning Taiwanese (Hokkien) got a good response, I would like to ask if anyone has had any experience learning Hakka or any of Taiwan’s aboriginal languages. I guess no one would learn one of the aboriginal languages unless they had a close connection with an aboriginal community or special academic interest.
Anyway if anyone has any experiences to report please post them.
Indeed, I’m doing the romanization tables for Dongshi (Taizhong
County) Hakka. These are on my website [in Chinese only] as well as
in the textbooks we make. This is a total volunteer effort of all
involved.
The final sentence on my tables is that even though I’ve made the
table, I cannot actually speak Hakka, (due to studying Taiwanese
etc. at the same time.)
Note that if I wasn’t surrounded by Hakkas, I probably wouldn’t have
studied it.
By the way, I also studied sheng1yun4xue2 = historical Chinese
phonology, where you get an overview of all dialects at once… Be
like me and go sit in, at your nearest university’s Chinese Dept., 3rd
year.
Hakka “mother tongue” lessons are being offered at 3F, No. 92, Minquan W. Rd., Datong District, Taibei 103 Tel: 886-2-2553-6533 Fax: 886-2-2553-6548 E-mail: taiwanhakka at pchome dot com dot tw Web site: http://www.hi-taiwan.org - it’s one of those horrible Taiwan-style web sites with annoying animated gifs and moving writing all over the place. I don’t know whether these lessons would be suitable for someone starting from zero - that is the problem I had trying to learn Hokkien together with Taiwanese people at a local church. Anyway, the Hakka place is just a few doors along from the main entrance of Minquan MRT.