agreed - just think about a girl shouting at her boyfriend “peee laa” (屁啦)
agreed - just think about a girl shouting at her boyfriend “peee laa” (屁啦)[/quote]
That’s reallly funny, and really harsh, and the thing is it is representative of the closest most many of us “foreigners” come to experiencing the local culture and language. And frankly, most don’t even get that close. But it is a long, long way (and this is not directed at you touduke, but rather in the spirit of recent threads I’ve been posting) from even beginning to touch on what Taiwanese Minan is.
I grew up speaking Taiwanese as my first language (until kindergarten when i started learning english) and mando i started learning after high school.
LIving in heavily benshenren part of taipei, initially the thought of even learning mandarin was almost treason. haha. Considering my moms side of the family spoke japanese all day long at home.
but honestly after learning to speak mandarin well, i almost never use taiwanese anymore. And i think mandarin in general sounds better then taiwanese. I still prefer to count in Taiwanese though as i can do it fastest in that langauge. And i do think taiwanese can sound nice when spoken by a nice looking young lady (as does just bout any other language out there).
And taiwanese (fujianese) is supposedly older then mandarin as a language so they say and indeed is very full of culture.
But it doesnt sound any better then cantonese that is for sure.
Unfortunately i no longer prefer to speak it all day long when in taiwan (probably incapable of speaking it all day long ) , rather preferring to use mandarin. but if i had a mainly taiwanese speaking GF (still possible down south although rare as most taiwanese under 40 these days speak mandarin) I would probably be able to get back into it.
I have no trouble understanding it though. And for some reason I still think that foreigners can actually acquire a more correct pronunciation in Taiwanese then in mandarin , a language MOST foreigners will forever sound “foreign” in.
I knew this italian catholic preacher once whos Taiwanese was absolutely flawless. You could put a farmers banana leaf hat on him and think he was taiwanese no doubt. He couldnt speak a lick of mando too.
Still prefer mandarin though.
Good example, Feiren. The truth is, any language can sound lovely in the right hands, and harsh in more calloused ones. It’s easy to point to examples of the latter when one has an agenda, and it’s also easy to be led astray when the only examples one has belong to the latter group. That’s not to say some languages don’t have an inherent advantage in aural aesthetics. I personally don’t put most SE Asian languages like Thai, Cantonese and Taiwanese, and separately German, in the aesthetically advantaged group, and favor Romance languages. But that could be a personal aesthetic bias, and the fact that I’ve actually studied and like Thai, German, Cantonese and Taiwanese (and Romance) languages and have traveled in all these areas with positive experiences will hopefully lend some perspective to my comments.
Actually one of the things i like most about visiting Thailand was to listen to young thai ladies speaking thai. Sounds like cats talking. Very cute.
Down, tommy! Cute girls sound cute no matter WHAT language they’re speaking. And put that thing back in your pants! DisGUSting! Harumph! 
Now you’re just encouraging him. And nothing sounds more fearsome than an angry Taiwanese woman having a go at you in Taiwanese, nor sweeter to my ears than the same speaking English in an English accent.
NO seriously, thai spoken by young thai girls sounds the closest to cats talking that iv heard so far. And i like cats.
I even like listening to thai lady announcers on the news when im in thailand in my hotel room.
Indonesian is another language that sounds nice and cute when spoken by indo young ladies.
English is the best sounding language when spoken by guys in my humble view.
p.s. to bis. Yes i would agree. Angry women sound bad in any language tho. Honestly.
Sure you can use the same characters, but they don’t have the same pronunciation. When the Chinese hymns come up in church I can read them; I’m so familiar with the characters now I can pick up the hymn book and sing by myself. But when the Taiwanese hymns come up, using Chinese characters of course, I have absolutely no idea how to sing them. When I sing the characters by reading the characters as Mandarin, it’s painfully obvious that what I am singing is different to what everyone else is singing.
田中的白鷺鷥 無欠缺什麼
山頂的百合花 春天現香味
總是全能的上帝
每日賞賜真福氣
使地上發 芽 結實
顯出疼痛的根據
耶和華祝福滿滿
親像海邊土沙
恩典慈愛直到萬世代
我要舉手敬拜祂
出歡喜的歌聲
讚美稱頌祂名永無息
Worst of all, after months of listening to other people singing it in Taiwanese, I still can’t remember how they’re pronouncing the characters. I can’t even differentiate between each of the characters when they’re singing.
That’s actually my own favourite language, for speaking, listening, and singing. On the other hand the grammar is utterly detestable, it takes real skill to make it sound good as oratory or song (Latin is an absolute dog of a language and it died a well deserved death, but it sounds divine when sung; the less said about Greek the better), and it’s not very accessible to the non-native ear.
It’s very likely that Taiwanese Minan shares many peculiar features with some of the other Chinese languages. It certainly sounds like it has a lot of peculiar features. But what do we really mean when we say ‘one of the richest languages’? English has a colossal vocabulary drawn from who knows how many other cultures and languages, and shares all kinds of weird peculiarities with the Romance languages. On that score English is positively wealthy, but it doesn’t mean much in real life.
Yeah but all this really means is that you can read what other people wrote even if they speak a different Chinese dialect. It doesn’t get you any closer to speaking those languages, and it doesn’t mean you can suddenly speak or even read Korean, Vietnamese, and Japanese. It just seems to be a compensation prize for brutalizing your memory with a horrifically inefficient communication system which people in Mesopotamia had the good sense to abandon about 1,000 years before the Chinese started to use it. The Mesopotamians of course went with an alphabet, and the rest is history. Seriously, no one actually planning a language would choose logographs anymore than they would end up with something like English (a total mental asylum of a language).
Sounds like, well, English. Unfortunately I don’t have the kind of time which a serious investment in Taiwanese requires. Maybe later.
Yes that’s a good point. It would help if I didn’t hear it predominantly from angry old women and betel nut chewing flipflop wearers.
[quote=“Fortigurn”]
Yes that’s a good point. It would help if I didn’t hear it predominantly from angry old women and betel nut chewing flipflop wearers.[/quote]
Yep, I myself do look down upon people that speak Taiwanese and not Mandarin…probably from being in Beijing before coming here having Mandarin drilled into my head as being the best Chinese dialect. But…Mandarin is actually superior to Taiwanese. It’s the most straight-forward, clearest, most widely-understood Chinese language. Even the mess of a language that is Japanese is still preferred over Taiwanese by old people. Japanese has four ways of writing, Taiyu, zero.
I agree that Taiyu (and Minnan in general) has a very rich culture, but all of this is only from Gudai stuff (Imperial? how do you say that?), nothing in modern Chinese history that hasn’t been documented or whatever in Mando or Canto. Also, I’ve heard that using Minnan to read Classical Chinese is less of a brainfuck than Mando or Canto…but that’s Classical Chinese, who can actually read that (or wants to) anyway?
Side note: Does anyone else besides me call those blue flip-flops ‘taike tuoxie’?
Shall we count the errors in the above? How much time do you have?
No dialect is “superior” to any other dialect. Some might be more useful in certain circumstances, or more appropriate, or be considered more mellifluous by some or even by many. But that’s just an ignorant statement up there. Mandarin is hardly more “straightforward” then Taiwanese, nor is it clearer. It is certainly more widely understood, but that hardly makes it “superior”. And there are a number of ways of writing Taiwanese. Just because you’re not aware of them doesn’t make them go away. Sorry, but this kind of categorical ignorance is really irritating to me.
Certainly no one with your breadth of linguistic knowledge and discernment.
Wow. Noobs. 
Some things to bring about this thread:
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Taiwanese is the closest language to the official language used in Tang Dynasty; that’s why it is sometimes called 河洛話, where 河洛 mostly means 黃河 & 洛陽 area - the capital area of Tang Dynasty.
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Chinese was actually adopted to form Japanese at the time of Tang Dynasty, if I remember right it’s 600+ yeasr ago, when the official language spoken in China was close to Taiwanese. That’s why many Japanese words sound like Taiwanese, such as sensei = 先生 (pronounced ‘sen sin’ in Taiwanese), nippon = 日本 (pronounced ‘li bun’ in Taiwanese). So it’s hard to say its older people’s preference with Japanese over Taiwanese. Besides the two languages are similar in pronuncitation of many words , some of the old people were brought up with Japanese as their first language.
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So we can almost say those many old peoms in Tang (and Sung I believe) Dynasty were the written form of Taiwanese!
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Taiwanese is more melodic than Mandarin, because there are 8 tones in Taiwanese while there are only 5 tones in Mandarin. Actually in many Taiwanese songs, the lyrics pronunciation is close enough to the melody itself, if you pay close attention.
Actually that’s a win for Taiyu from my point of view. That the Japanese ended up with three sets of characters plus romaji is just bad management.
I don’t think just adding tones necessarily makes a language more melodic, it’s how they’re used. I find that the more abrupt tone shifts are required, the less melodic a language is, which is why I’m not fond of Canto.
The answer is three.
I thought this was the random number thread for a sec there.
It depends on who’s speaking it, I’d say.
I’m used to hearing it from my family a lot, I can understand it, but I don’t speak it. Right now, I live in the U.S. so English is the language I use the most (followed by Spanish). I’m a bit rusty on Mandarin as well, but it usually picks up within one or two weeks of me being in Taiwan.
It depends on who’s speaking it, I’d say.[/quote]
^^^This
Many younger Taiwanese people mumble when they speak Taiwanese (and Mandarin). When you hear someone enunciate clearly and exaggerate the tones, it is beautiful. I remember thinking that Taiwanese was an ugly language as well, until I sat next to some guy on the bus who was speaking Taiwanese while on his cell phone. He had a strong, deep voice and didn’t mumble at all. Then when I met my girlfriend I heard the female version of beautiful Taiwanese; soft, clear and feminine.
Hm, may i suggest a slight rewording: a large number of expressions from Chinese were incorporated into Japanese (quite comparable to how words from old French, Greek, and Latin were incorporated into English)
You may want to double the value you have stored in your memory - the Tang dynasty ended about 1200 years ago. 
(BTW - maybe OT - here is a good overview of the Japanese language: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_language - see especially the section “vocabulary”)
Right - and that’s why i understand more here than i expected! Even though i am not studying Taiwanese right now (am busy enough with Mandarin), the similarity between Taiwanese and Japanese helps in many situations - both ways!
Yes, Japanese was the official language of Taiwan until 1945 - and it was still used for some after that as lingua france between members of different tribes in eastern Taiwan, so most people over 70, and in eastern Taiwan also many who are younger than that, can use it to some extent.
Regarding the mistaken notion that Taiwanese is inferior to Mandarin, i think someone much more competent than myself has put that to rest already.
I would punch kittens in exchange to be fluent in taiwanese. How embarrassing it is to be a taiwanese and yet not able to speak/understand your own language? It’s like being a cow and not know how to moo.
Bit of a paradox. Something tells me you weren’t raised on Isla Formosa…