yeah, you might get stares and laughs, but after some explanation people get it and you just try to say it the right way next time…
true, taiwanese seem to have some trouble understanding xihongshi, but I still wouldn’t overestimate the differences. It’s the same language after all just with some regional differences like American and British English or Geman spoken in Germany, Austria or Switzerland
My missus gets a laugh out of me using ke for a quarter of an hour, such as jiu dian cha yi ke - quarter to 9.
Don’t really know why.
HG
Yeah I’ve had that reaction. Sounds a bit too quaint maybe. Or else it pushes the ‘mainland buttons’, you know the ones where you just get an instinctive laugh or turned up nose in distaste. A bit like us British do on hearing American English. The only difference is, these days we gleefully adopt Americanisms without batting an eyelid. In the last 30 or 40 years, in Britain at least there has been an increasing acceptance that English is a world language that people do what they like with. This has gone hand in hand with the abandonment of the whole RP project. People working in TV and radio no longer need to ditch their regional accents (although granted you don’t hear the most extreme examples). Given the political differences though, I don’t suppose it’s reasonable to expect the same thing to happen with modern Mandarin Chinese. Not just yet anyway 
In the days when there were not so many news channels, I did feel that the “Taiwan Guoyu” being spoken by newsreaders was somewhat removed from the guoyu I heard every day. Nowadays, the Mandarin spoken by newsreaders varies quite a bit. It sounded like the Mandarin dub track of an old Hong Kong film.