Should Taiwanese kids be learning how to spell in Taiwanese?

[bifletor]

[quote=“cranky laowai”](BifleTor, you wouldn’t happen to have Unger’s review of Hannas, would you? I’ve been looking for that but couldn’t find the journal in the National Central Library and haven’t had time to go out to Academia Sinica for it.)
[/quote]

I’ve actually read Unger’s review of Hannas’s book. I’m not sure if I can dig it up, though. I’ll check. Unger first praises Hannas’s book in several respects: in exposing the ideographic myth, the homonym myth, as well as other common misconceptions about characters. He says the book is superior to one by Insup Taylor (Korean specialist who promulgates these misconceptions). Unger, then takes a different tack and begins criticizing Hannas’s view of how writing represents language (I forget the objections, but they are more subtle, not glaring ones like those above).

[Spack]

All the above comments about linguistics are very interesting. However, to all the unfortunate 7-12 year old guinea pigs who have to learn Taiwanese formally in school, that is all just hot air.

Shouldn’t the teaching of Taiwanese be based mainly on listening and speaking? Writing systems could be introduced gradually at a much later stage, after say two or three years.

I think policy makers have not thought about what they actually want to achieve with the education scheme. Do they want kids to be able to speak, read or write Taiwanese? If all three, then where should the emphasis lie - with reading and writing? Surely oral proficiency is most important, at least for elementary school kids.

[daltongang]

reading and writing are two sides of the same coin. students will benefit greatly in their studies by first aquiring a romanization by which they can easily write down things they learn, put down thoughts, etc. this should be obvious. it is hardly pointless, because they will be able to write any word that they can speak without the far greater and effort of…

learning to use characters to write Taiwanese is in essence learning a whole new writing system.

not to mention not 100% possible. how about japanese loan words? have fun using characters for them!

It’s not the depth of the meaning but the means of expression that matters. If it can be spoken and understood, it can be romanized successfully.

i agree with both of the above quotes wholeheartedly.

but, you may as well try to seperate the chinese from their rice as their characters. work them in, students should be able to use them where they can and romanization where they can’t.

Dalton: Grafting: I know what you mean. I’m sure you would think that I understand these problems as well as you do. I guess those of us who ahve studied it would know that 香 in Minnan uses a different word 芳. Then again, you can write 香 and someone will read it as phang, because they’re just translating it, not exactly reading its real pronunciation which is the other word. But then 香港 would be read according to that characte’s correct pronunciation.

jack, you may grasp what i’m saying but i disagree with you on a number of levels here. someone reading taiwanese shouldn’t have to go through the step of translating from mandarin. such a system wouldn’t be helping anything, but rather putting another nail in the coffin of the taiwanese language as it would inevitably strengthen the trend towards mandarin usage in taiwanese. also people read by sounding and you are simply complicating the task of reading for them with this translation exercise. you’ve also increased the confusing enough two possible pronunciations for this character to three.
also, you’re throwing a monkey wrench into the dubiously practical but immensely valuable cultural and historical heritage of written chinese. throughout history, there has been no such pronunciation for this character. this shouldn’t be taken lightly.
as bifleter says there are no shortcuts to character usage for taiwanese, i feel strongly that any system trying to introduce such ideas would be a disaster.

i don’t have any software but i see there is one on that site you posted, i think i’ll try it out. i like inputing in phonetics so that won’t bother me.