Quoted for truth. There’s a pair of old ladies in an apartment in the building next to ours, and when they get going you can hear them clearly through two concrete walls. Despite being in the same room, they find it necessary to absolutely scream at each other; not because they’re angry (although Taiwanese always sounds to me like someone isn’t enjoying themselves), but because it just seems to be the mandatory volume level if you’re using Taiwanese.[/quote]
I disagree. Taiwanese and Mandarin are equally melodious/ill-sounding to my ears, like English. All depends on who’s talking and their mood.
I studied Taiwanese for three months in 2008, one-on-one at TLI. I know a lot of words, several sentences, and can understand a good deal of the language. Studying Southern Min was the topic for my master’s and it was going to be a case study of my own learning of the language until one Prof poo-pooed that idea and it turned into a study of another foreigner’s learning of Taiwanese and unfortunately my own learning suffered.
It is such a cool language, much more interesting to listen to than the Mandarin that is murdered here, which appears to be a result of the influence Taiwanese has had on it, interestingly enough.
Don’t get me wrong, I love Mandarin when it is spoken properly, preferable by someone from NE China.
Taiwanese mandarin is much better then China mandarin. Even many China chinese think so. Only the dummy foreigners wanting to be beijing swears by it.
All em china chinese studiers wanting to be holier then thou with their beijingese, like its a holy grail.
Ya’all want to speak China’s version of the Queens English. But actually nobody really speaks like the Queen in the UK do they? Except maybe Elton John, the other Queen.
I hate China passionately and after living in that place for six years hope to never set foot into that hellhole of a country again, but I sure do love the way them North-Easterners speak Mandarin.
Certainly Mandarin can sound horrible; the Beijingers do their best in this regard (most Mandarin I hear sounds very melodious). English can sound wonderful, but frequently suffers from being spoken by Australians, Americans, Canadians, New Zealanders, South Africans, and English people, with various horrible accents. But Taiwanese? I’ve never heard it sound melodious. I’ve also hardly ever even heard it spoken at a volume anything less than the level of a shout (other than on the MRT). It just sounds like the perfect language for old angry people with throat problems.
[quote=“kaikai34”]I learned all my Taiwanese from tv commercials.
Kong Tia Ling - ai gai la!
Sao Jing - za go hun jing, ke so OUT!
Kong ba kong kong - kong gu ling - kong kong kong[/quote]
Siong ho!
When spoken at a volume less than the level of a shout, which it sometimes is it can be quite elegant.[/quote]
It sounds nice in those old songs…and it’s definitely not as ear piercing as Hakka…but I feel like there are only a grand total of maybe 10 sounds in Taiyu.
Hui, chit, ga, lei, an, nei, liao, kua, jit, go
By far, the nicest Mandarin is in Hebei province, where it’s still correct but not tainted with 兒. Dongbeihua has too many problems with ‘s’ and ‘sh’, in the opposite of Taiwan, where 三 becomes 山. Also they throw in 賊 (zei) in place of 很 all the time. I despise Taiwanese-accented Mandarin…but my ‘accent’ or whatever has totally switched over during the past few years. It’s odd, I’ll still say Mainland words like “衛生間” or “出租車” when I’m tired or drunk, just accented in Taiwanese-Mandarin. I’ve especially hated my Chinese teachers here in the past that use words like ‘liaogai ma?’ or ‘an nei…ki do ee a?’ in the context of a Mandarin class. Or when you ask someone if they mean zang or zhang, xiao shao or sao, chen cheng or ceng, and they can’t tell you. ‘Huo guo’ becomes ‘ho gou’…the L and R thing (which Mainlanders don’t have), and, where the hell did “bu hui!” come from linguistically? Ah…the list goes on and on.
…and then the worst of all “ah…ni hao mahuan ei”!
台灣國語 at it’s finest.
I have a friend here who is CBC and can only speak Taiwanese…it’s pretty funny to be his ‘Mandarin translator’ when he can’t get his point across to Taiwanese people. 1. Tries in Taiyu. 2. Asks me in English how to say something in Mandarin. 3. Puts the Mandarin inside the Taiyu sentence. 4. They still don’t get it. 5. I repeat the whole sentence completely in Mandarin, problem solved.
Isn’t Taiwanese linguistically inferior to Mandarin, though? I remember reading something online by a professor somewhere about the structure and a comparison of the two. It was a good read. I mean you can’t even write it without bastardizing characters. I always see 麥共 being used…
Too right. A mate of mine came over to Taiwan recently. He has lived in China for the last 15 years (most of it in Beijing), and his Mandarin is so fluent it was spinning the heads of the locals (much to my envy). I was amused however when we visited a tiny local restaurant which is a favourite of mine (I’ve come to know the family over the last year), and I found myself having to translate his Beijing Mandarin into a more localized dialect, and then their localized Chinese into Beijingese. It’s a shame he caught Beijing Disease though; those people sound like they’re speaking through a mouth full of gravel. They’re what Queenslanders are to Australian English.
Your comments aren’t surprising, and I understand well that if you haven’t made the effort to study it, you’ll never come anywhere near beginning to appreciate it (and this is an understatement). But I will say that it is your deep loss. We live here, and Taiwanese is one of the richest languages on earth, both colloquially and lliterarily (and one of the rare languages in which these two veins coexist very deeply and tighly).
I’m only responding to your post because I I think you have some sense of language and culture (at least Western languages and Judeo-Christian Culture), but you are so far off the mark on the Taiwanese language that it makes anything you have to say about any language or culture hard to take seriously.
Don’t get me wrong, I would love to speak it. Quite apart from being able to speak to friends at church who prefer it to Chinese (and I would finally be able to sing the Taiwanese hymns), I would love to be able to use it with some of my neighbours. But right now I have an uphill battle with Mandarin. The idea of having to re-learn all the characters is a horrifying idea, for a start.
I don’t think I have said anything which is far off the mark on the Taiawnese language. I’ve simply given my completely subjective personal opinion on how it sounds to me. Talk of how it’s ‘one of the richest languages on earth, both colloquially and lliterarily’ (something which seems invariably to be said about anyone’s personal favourite language), doesn’t change how it sounds to me. It sounds to me as unmelodic and grating as Queenslander English sounds to me. I don’t like the sound of Cantonese either. Korean on the other hand is downright hilarious; I don’t think anyone could deny it’s one of the most ridiculous sounding languages ever invented. It’s a pleasure to listen to.
I don’t know, mate. Maybe I’ve been here too long (in the south), but I prefer it when they’re “shouting” at each other. Those two sound like two cats being strangled.
I don’t understand what you mean by “re-learn all the characters.” The vast majority of Taiwanese and Mandarin words can be, and are, expressed with the same characters. Granted, there are plenty of exceptions, but that’s small stuff.
Fair enough.
My personal “favorite language” is my mother tongue, English, but I 've also grown to appreciate the various Chinese languages. When I said “one of the richest languages,” I was not speaking subjectively, I was referring to peculiar features of Taiwanese Minan (shared with some of the other Chinese languages) that other widely spoken modern languages simply do not share. There has been much debate on this board and elsewhere about the merits, or otherwise, of Chinese characters (as opposed to an alphabet or syllabary system). I have to agree with Cranky Laowai and others that the Chinese characters, for the purposes of any given Chinese, or other, language, taken in isolation, are one of the clumsiest and most inefficient writing systems in use in the world today. But the benefit of the characters is that, once learned, they form an incredible system of mnemonics that links all of the Chinese languages (Cantonese, Minan, Hakka, Toishan, and so forth) as well as a number of other languages, whether linguistically related or not (Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese), with a common centuries-old literary tradition. The reason the Taiwanese language as spoken today is so rich is that for centuries its speakers have been exploiting this feature of the language to draw on the canon of classical Chinese literature and interweave it with their everyday speech. If you have the chance to study a little more Taiwanese, and get to the level where you can begin to understand, for example, some of the puppet theatre, or opera, that one hears on street corners every day in the older parts of the city, you will begin to get an appreciation for this.
Fair enough again. But once you understand a bit more of it, you might hear it differently.
While her music is far from my favorite style, Jiang Hui’s diction and phrasing is a pretty good example of how nice Taiwanese can sound.
(Jiang Hui :“If the Flower Leaves the Stem” 江蕙 - 花若離枝)
Chen Mingzhang is a good male example.
(Chen Mingzhang: “Opera in the Afternoon” 陳明章 下午的一齣戲)
I think that many foreigners acquire the idea that Taiwanese sounds vulgar from their Mandarin teachers. Of course it is the language of pool halls, laborers, and farmers and can be very forceful. But it has many other modalities as well.
Both of those were pretty good. Nothing like strangling cats at all.
That’s part of it’s appeal to me. Personally, I find that the “Mandarin Only” crowd are disdainful of themselves and their roots and nothing short of snobbish. Bit like the crowd that used to call Afrikaans Kitchen Dutch (or worse, Kitchen Kaffir) a century or so ago in South Africa. I like the “commonness” of Taiwanese as it reminds me a lot of Afrikaans. I wish I could speak it fluently.
it can be quite elegant.
