OK, I know plenty of foreigners who have obtained various levels of proficiency in mandarin Chinese. How many people have successfully learnt Taiwanese (Hokkien)?
Did you learn Mandarin first?
Did you use a textbook, attend lessons learn by ear or any other techniques?
Any other advice or experience?
I can speak some and understand some moreâŚbut it is a difficult language and sometimes when I say words⌠people look at me strange cause I get the already complicated tones asswaysâŚ
I learned it in Ilan and from my girlfriendâŚits pretty basic though⌠can have a small conversation and ask for things⌠give directions⌠use bad languageâŚetc
I am convinced sometimes though people like hearing my Taiwanese so they can a good laugh
here was my first few sentences
Donât know how to write in Pinyon but have a try( a must learn for the student who wants to learn Taiwanese:
Show Jaa Lee jin sue EE
Shau Jie ⌠you are beautiful
Lee cha Dza Bow
You are like a tiger ( usually say it to an angry girl⌠and can give a violent response)
Lee Dee um Dee Um
Shut up!!!
Lee U (as in long U) Tza Bo bing U (as in long U) bO?
Do you have a boyfriend?
Tza Bo (if you change the tone on the Bo it means girl)
Boo A - dont have
U (as in long U) A - have
lee dwa do we?
Where do you live?
Lee bay Ki do we?
Where are you going?
Wa bay dung Ki
I am going home
Wa bay Die Ba Ki
I am going to Taipei
A Dama gong gu Ree
Head full of cement
Belu
Beer
G U O (say them phonetically)
Soâ
G U O kang gou Ba Jia M She G U O
You can take a cow to BeiJing but a cow is still a cow ( it means you cannot change people)
Sha show used at the end of a sentence is very effective(pronoucing ow as in cow)
Lee Kwa Sha show?
What the f* are you looking at ?
Lee Gung Sha show?
What the f* are you saying ?
Lee tea A Sha show?
What the f* are you listening to ?
Lee K U O Sha show?
What the f* are you laughing at ?
Lee Gan Sha show?
What the f* are you f*cking ?
tehn you have got other things like counting⌠once you learn these you can impress the guy at the noodle stand
Else when you are passing a shop at the nightmarket you can start shouting TZA GOâŚand everybody will stampede thinking it is a sale for NTD10
Iâve learned Taiwanese to kind of a low-intermediate level. Of course, I was pretty fluent in Mandarin first, which didnât hurt any (although that can be tough because you tend to lapse back into Mandarin words when the going gets tough, not that lots of Taiwanese donât do that tooâŚ!)
I began at TLI years ago for a short time, then did a language exchange in the States, and then got ahold of the Maryknoll books (no tapes yetâŚnext month!! ) and finally was lucky enough to stumble onto a really gifted teacher of Taiwanese in the form of one of my language exchange partner. For some reason she has a very strong ability to clarify points about Taiwanese, although she has absolutely no background in language teaching. Problem was that we got so friendly that the proportion of Taiwanese and Spanish dropped, Mandarin increased, and hotpot restaurants began to figure more and more prominently in the undertakingsâŚ
I strongly recommend using Church romanization for Taiwanese. It does look a bit strange at first, but it helps a lot. The other thing that was a real breakthrough for me was going to the library (years back at university) and looking up the rules for the tone changes in Taiwanese. In Mandarin tone 3 goes to 2 in front of another tone 3, but in Taiwanese every tone changes if it is not syllable-final or utterance final (and there are some exceptions to these rules too). Once I âmemorizedâ the tone change rules, it became easier to see what was going on, although Iâm definitely still in the stage that language educators like to describe charitably as âcan be understood by a sympathetic listener who is a native speaker of the target language.â
I believe the key in learning Taiwanese is just like the key to any other language: less is more. You wonât learn the language better by being exposed to more stuff in class. Learn it narrow and deep. Really REALLY learn the words you have âlearnedâ and then you will be able to pick up much more in your other encounters. To my knowledge, there arenât any textbooks written like this yet, but give us time. Sooner or later Chinese teaching will reach the 20th century.
By the way â the âboy/girlâ thing the last poster mentioned â itâs not only a tone, but also a different consonant. TW has weird âunaspiratedâ consonants that are like swallowing an âmâ. Try saying âmâ but breathing in instead of out when you do, through your mouth. Thatâs just about the sound you need for âgirlâ. In English we have three consonants in the same âplaceâ (that is, b,p, and m, which are all formed with both lips together). Both b and p are âaspiratedâ [prounced with a puff of air] in English (at least when theyâre at the beginning of a word). M is a nasal (the air comes out of your nose when you pronounce it). But English does not have âthe other oneâ that TW has, hence our discomfort!
Terry (who will be back refusing to âunderstandâ Mandarin and making trouble for kids working in McDonalds who donât speak Taiwanese very soon)
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Iron Lady
A friend who is a teacher of Taiwanese once told me that it is possible to learn a certain number of Phonetic sounds that will cover the range of sounds in the Taiwanese language.
How many phonetic sounds are in Taiwanese?
I think knowing this would help most people cause if you at least learned them you could understand Taiwanese better. ONe problem I have is I canât really distinguish things like what you described, the boy/girl word. Taiwanese though always tell me its easy
Another problem with this is many times the language sounds the same and Taiwanese who try to teach it to me, have learned the language from the age of two, so they cannot describe the movement of the mouth and breathing that you described before.
I feel sometimes them trying to describe how to say it is like trying to describe colours to a person who has been blind since birth
The only way I know how to learn it is to repeat what they say. Yes the pronounication isnât very good and I am not doing the language justice but usually people understand what I am saying by simply undertanding the context it is in.
I got a book on Taiwanese before, but with English and Chinese translations. The problem was that when I said a word, it was understandable but it seemed to be a standardized version of Taiwanese and not what the locals speak. Espically if I was in Ilan, people would ask what part of Taiwan did I say to say that, as their Taiwanese is slightly different to Southern Taiwan Taiwanese
ErâŚumâŚ(grinding of teeth)âŚcanât remember how many sounds Taiwanese has!! (big embarassment! If I canât do these kinds of tricks, how will I entertain at cocktail parties??)
Basically, the consonants come in groups of three (except there are also nasal sounds, where you get an extra bonus sound for the same low price! Call now, operators are standing by.)
Youâve got the voiced one, the voiceless one, and the voiceless aspirated one (in linguistics terms). That means one where you hear your voice (like âgâ, âbâ, âdâ), one where you donât (âkâ,âpâ,âtâ) and one where you spit on people (âkhâ, âphâ, âthâ in Church Romanization). So you can see that you pronounce them the same way in terms of where your tongue and lips are, but the variation comes from the voice or spitting of air:
ph th kh (no voice, puff of air, 99% like the p,t,k at the beginning of a word in English)
p t k (no voice AND no puff of air â does not exist in English at hte BEGINNING of a word, but you can hear it in a words like âspellâ, âstirâ, âskipâ â hear how soft and gentle that âp/t/kâ is?)
b d g (voice, no puff of air â like the b,d,g in English but NOT at the beginning of a word, more like in the middle; say a word like sable, saddle, haggle; no puff of air, right?)
Bonus sounds: the nasals (no big mystery there, itâs pretty much like English: m, n).
The place I always get fouled up on is the âpalatalsâ (the sounds where your tongue is in the middle of the roof of your mouth). (Somehow I seem to have problems remembering words that start with these sounds in Mandarin, tooâŚ??) But the relationship between the set of sounds is the same. The three possibilities are still voiced and unaspirated, voiceless and unaspirated, and voiceless and aspirated.
I sure canât speak Taiwanese very well (i.e., Iâm not fluent at ALL), but I might be able to explain to you how to âfixâ the sounds youâre making if we know what word youâre aiming for so that we can find it in the dictionary!
This whole thing about sounds reminds me of being in interpreting class in the mid-90s, where we were treated to a âguest lectureâ by a famous elderly female Chinese radio broadcaster. She herself had exemplary pronunciation in Mandarin; most of the students in the class had typical mixed-up Taiwanese accents. The problem was that although this lady spoke beautifully, she had no idea about how to tell the students to change the way they were pronouncing something; her method was the tried-and-true foreigner-talk âIâll repeat the same thing louder and louder and eventually it will sink in.â Of course, it didnât! (In my case, as the only foreigner in the class, she just shrugged in despair and gave up, so at least I still have my hearing.)
Hope this doesnât confuse you moreâŚ
Terry
Of course, all this is compounded by the different words and accents of different cities.
I first learned a smattering of Taiwanese while I lived in Tainan (just enough to get me into trouble ). Then when I moved to Taichung, there was a different accent, and even different words!
My Taichung friends said my âTainan accentâ sounded low-class and vulgar, while my Tainan friends said my âTaichung accentâ sounded sissy. Iâm still deciding which one I should go with⌠low-class⌠or sissyâŚ?
But seriously, TW is definitely a difficult language; I think Cantonese is even a fair amount easier. Iâm so glad Mandarin the most prevalent dialect everywhere, because itâs by far the easiest to learn!
This discussion has got me itching to get started. Iâve been meaning to start learning Taiyu for ages now, but my girlfriend wonât help me because she doesnât like it. Sheâs a crap teacher anyway. Still a lot of it sounds really similar to guoyu to me. Phrases sound similar in intonation, is what I mean.
So what I need to get started is some sort of intro to the romanisation - a Taiyu version of the bo po mo fo.
Ironlady, Tainan accent obviously. Taiyu is song anyway.
Bri
Bri,
Maybe I can introduce you to my former language exchange in Taipei. Sheâs probably the best Taiyu teacher Iâve ever had, and sheâs completely untrainedâŚjust a natural. She can read Romanization but I donât know how good she would be at writing it, though.
Terry
I am now on approximately my 60, yes 60th tape from Maryknoll, 120Sanmin Rd. Sec 1, Taizhong â that is where the fellow who recordedthem, Chen Liangxiong worked when I bought them 10 years ago.catholic.org.tw/friendship/school.htm mentions their TaibeibranchâŚI modified my tape player so I could repeat over and over.The church romanization looks bad to hanyu pinyin fans, bu
Iâm a Hanyu pinyin fan and I think Church Romanization is just dandy!! What I canât deal with are âsilent qâ and âsilent vâ and what have you in some of the other systems.
Terry
quote:
Originally posted by Bu Lai En: my girlfriend won't help me because she doesn't like it.
Iâve noticed that a lot of women here, especially in Taipei, seem to dislike Taiwanese. Itâs like they think speaking it is uncouth and below them or something, while guys generally donât seem to have a problem with it.
Itâs hard for me to make progress on my Taiwanese in Taipei because I already know Mandarin and itâs too easy to use that to communicate, and everyone here speaks Mandarin. When I leave the city and go south, however, I try to speak Taiwanese with everyone.
[my whizmatic homebrew posting system cut the rest of this off:] The church
romanization looks bad to hanyu pinyin fans, but thatâs life. As
finding the often forgotten original characters for Taiwanese words,
and how they relate to Mandarin, saves synapses in my brain, I rely on
books by Lin Jinchao, Zheng Liangwei (Robert L. Cheng) etc. You might
start with the works of B. Karlgren in fact, as an introduction to
Chinese historical phonology (sheng1yun4xue2), and sit in on some
sheng1yun4xue2 classes as mentioned in my other postings⌠This has
been my set-up for ten years, however now there are web resources too
I assumeâŚ
I suppose some of the books can be had at Student Book Co. (Xuesheng
shuju) or SMC (Nantian shuju).
Chinese historical phonology sounds great. What is it? (seriously, Iâm interested).
quote:
I've noticed that a lot of women here, especially in Taipei, seem to dislike Taiwanese. It's like they think speaking it is uncouth and below them or something, while guys generally don't seem to have a problem with it.
My girlfriend mostly doesnât like it because she doesnât speak it well. Sheâs wai sheng ren (despite the fact that her motherâs family is Taiwanese and her father was born in Taiwan too - go figure). I guess in Taipei because Mandarin is used as the âpublicâ language, in schools, and written stuff, whereas Taiwanese is in the family, used for âearthyâ friendly talk and swearing, Mandarin gets the reputaion of being more cultured. So some people associate Taiyu with bin lang chewing tu bao zi yokels, so they donât like it. Maybe itâs similar to the situation a few hundred years ago in Europe where Latin and later French were the âhighâ languages whereas English etc were the vernacular, vulgar languages.
Bri
Another thing that helps me is listening to the story of Liao4
Tian1ding1 as narrated by Wu2 Le4tian1 [=Wu happy-sky], on the radio.
Use Mandarin to ask the lady on his âselling medicine hotlineâ
0800-023368, what broadcast times are for your area. There are
several stations that play him here in central Taiwan.
Though I donât understand all of it, the action packed narration is a
winner. Try 2-4 PM, FM 101.7 Taizhong. Also on other frequencies FM:
4-6 AM, AM: 00-02 AM plus more.
When I asked the lady [using mandarin Ms. Cai, 0800-023368, in
Zhanghua] what the times you Taibei people might try to tune into Wu2
Le4tian1âs action packed story telling program in Taiwanese, setting
50-100 years ago, she said FM 94.9 18:00-20:00 daily. Even the adds
for various medicine pills perhaps are of value in training for making
convincing lectures.
Nurdly me doesnât listen to stories, except in the language learning context.
For Taizhong, currently FM 101.7 14:00-16:00, and AM ~1200 00:00-02:00
are still broadcasting.
More links:
news:tw.bbs.soc.taiwanese ==
http://groups.google.com/groups?group=tw.bbs.soc.taiwanese
Indeed, shortening this search string reveals the rest of the groups.
(There is also news:soc.culture.taiwan , in English.)
Thank you for your question on Chinese historical phonology, which on
my homebrew batch posting system, I have just encountered as I write
this several hours before connecting my modem.
Here we see their association: http://web.cc.ntnu.edu.tw/~pho/
All one needs to do is sit in on the class with the same name,
sheng1yun4xue2, which you will find in any universityâs Chinese dept.,
3rd year, here in Taiwan.
This way you will become familiar with the rhyme books from 601
A.D. etc. that B. Karlgren talks about in his books etcâŚ
And that way it will all make sense why âproductâ is âpinâ in
Mandarin, Taiwanese, and âpimâ in Korean, but not in Hakka, even
though Hakka allows âfamâ where even in Taiwanese that m there would
be impossibleâŚ
Sounds like fun? Most of your classmates, as you sit-in, will reveal in
secret that they dread this course⌠lots of memorizing 1000 year old
rhyme classes⌠the Korean connection doesnât come in until grad school.
Anyway after a thorough grounding in this, youâll see why I think the
âtongyong pinyinâ inventor Yu Boquan is a punk. Wait, TaiDaâs Chinese
deptâs head Huang Xuanfan thinks Yu is cool, OK, sit in at TaiDa and
report back who is nuts.
At the risk of upsetting people⌠Why exactuly are you people going to the trouble of learning Taiwanese? I mean, learning Mandarin Chinese is hard enough, and when I master it (laughs) maybe I will move on to brush up Spanish or maybe try my hand at something fresh like Japanese.
I mainly encounter Taiwanese language when trying to get the house fixed, buying street food, or communicating with some elderly people. I guess it might be useful in business in the south of Taiwan, but not in Taipei.
Donât get me wrong, I would love to speak it, but why go to all the trouble of 1000âs of hours study? Maybe your interest is interllectual, cultural, or for the churchâŚ? Just curious!
There are many reasons for learning Taiwanese, especially if you live in Taiwan. For starters the language is spoken by 85% of the population. Mandarin has only been widely spoken in Taiwan for a little over 50 years. The language was imposed on the Taiwanese people by the KMT. Even when Taiwanese people speak Mandarin they sometimes use Taiwanese words for the names of foods or some slang. Learning Taiwanese gives more insights into the culture of Taiwan (as opposed to, dare I say it, the culture of China), and it helps to form a closer affinity with Taiwanese people.
Sadly Taiwanese (and minority languages) language education has been severely neglected in Taiwan. Obviously the KMT did this for ideological reasons. I hope the DPP and TSU can do something to improve the situation. However, I fear that they may fail on this not because they are opposed to the language but because of the general problems in the education system. If foreigners take the effort to learn even a little Taiwanese it will help to restore the pride of the Taiwanese in their language and hopefully encourage young Taiwanese to study it more seriously.
i often wonder how taiwanese kids learn taiwanese because from my experience, most of the younger ones(up to like high school) canât speak it very wellâŚeven kids in the south. they speak only mandarin in school and talk to their friends in mandarin. taiwanese seems to be something they learn as they get older. not really something they pick up from birth, but after years and years of hearing their parents and relatives speak it.
i speak taiwanese semi-fluently, but taiwanese romanization confuses the hell out of me. i admire people who try to learn the language(both westerners and weishenren), because god knows i wouldnât have a clue where to start if i didnât know it already. heck, iâm not even sure how to improve my taiwanese besides just listening to people speak it.
as for people in taiwan who think taiwanese is low-classâŚwell, you have elitist snobs in every culture. like people in england who judge each other by what type of accents they have.
oh, and the boy/girl thing, to my ears, boy sounds like âtza boâ with a rising tone and girl is more like âtza bvoâ with a falling tone. once again, i only speak it, i have to idea how to explain it linguistically.
One thing I had noticed is that speaking Taiwanese amoung young people seems to swing in and out of fashion.
Sadly use of the language also tends to make a political statement on the part of the speaker.
Iâm not sure I want to get into a debate about the value of preserving minority languages. Balancing the conflicting needs of accessible global communication verses cultural diversity would be a whole new thread!
-Malkie