Are there any good books, websites, CDs, etc. for English speakers learning Taiwanese? I’d prefer one with a good introduction to the romanisation system used in the book and a proper pronunciation guide. A tone diagram (like this one for Mandarin) would be especially good. So far, all I’ve found have been some really low-quality phrase books.
[color=#008040]Mod note: title altered to include synonyms of ‘Taiwanese’, as the latter is too common a word and the search function rejects it. – DB[/color]
Check out some of these threads (found by using “Taiwanese” as the search term, limiting search to “Learning Chinese” forum and looking only in thread titles):
I recommend you visit the “Taiwan Store” (台灣ㄟ店) – address below. They have a ton of cool books about Taiwan and a whole section of Taiwanese study materials including books, tapes, and CDs, ranging from beginning to advanced, using a variety of romanization systems. You can browse and select the ones that look most useful to you.
Address: 北市新生南路三段76巷6號 No. 6, Lane 76, Hsinsheng S. Rd., Sec. 3, Taipei (in an alley off Hsinsheng across from Nat’l Taiwan Univ.)
Tel：（02）23625799
[quote=“Rotalsnart”]I recommend you visit the “Taiwan Store” (台灣ㄟ店) – address below. They have a ton of cool books about Taiwan and a whole section of Taiwanese study materials including books, tapes, and CDs, ranging from beginning to advanced, using a variety of romanization systems. You can browse and select the ones that look most useful to you.
Address: 北市新生南路三段76巷6號 No. 6, Lane 76, Xinsheng S. Rd., Sec. 3, Taipei (in an alley off Xinsheng across from Nat’l Taiwan Univ.)
Tel：（02）23625799[/quote]
Thanks, Rotalsnart! Did you happen to see any simple dictionaries with romanization? The index in the back of my Maryknoll book 1 is rather incomplete. Does anyone else know of any Taiwanese dictionaries with an intelligible romanization system, church or other?
Yes, the three dictionaries below are the ones that I’ve found most useful. Number (1) is a concise (but not so concise as to call “simple”) Taiwanese-Mandarin dictionary of everyday terms organized phonetically by Taiwanese BoPoMoFo. Number (2) is a fairly simple Mandarin-Taiwanese dictionary of everyday terms organized phonetically by Mandarin BoPoMo but giving the Taiwanese pronunciations in the Taiwanese Language Phonetic Alphabet (TLPA). Number (3) is a fairly comprehensive Mandarin-Taiwanese reference dictionary organized in the traditional manner by radical, but with indices organized by both Mandarin and Taiwanese BoPoMoFo.
Nos. (1) and (3) are primarly reference works. No. (2), because it is so colloquial, would make a good study aid to study in its own right for someone who reads Mandarin and already has a rudimentary grasp of everyday Taiwanese.
All of these dictionaries use BoPoMo in some capacity, either for Mandarin, or Taiwanese, or both. If you already know BoPoMo for Mandarin and have a basic grasp of the Taiwanese sounds, you should be able to read the Taiwanese BoPoMo pretty intuitively, with minimal effort required to learn the few additional symbols necessary for the sounds unique to Taiwanese.
Incidentally, if you decide to buy a copy of number (1), I suggest you flip through and make sure the pages are all there. The first copy that I bought was missing one section of several consecutive pages (can’t remember which ones though). I didn’t notice the problem for quite a few years because it took me that long to get around to using it. Despite my having lost the receipt and the passage of years, the publisher (the author’s own company) replaced it with a new copy with no questions asked.
