Taiwanese accent and being corrected

[DrPepper]

@Hokwongwei

Silas makes good points. I would add that Chinese language education is getting to be very competitive. Taiwan had a monopoly for some time as China was largely closed off and Westerners regarded its institutions with suspicion, but in the past 20 or 30 years, mainland language centers have far overtaken their Taiwanese counterparts. To stay competitive, Taiwan’s need to switch to pinyin or risk being marginalized even further.

I agree - embracing pinyin WOULD help Taiwan stay competitive. And, from what I’ve been reading, they have already begun doing that (to varying degrees)*.

They could also simultaneously appeal to a niche segment who appreciates the fact that they still use/teach traditional characters (perhaps intermediate-level learners who are looking for something different after having conquered the basics).

There is a value in embracing their differences, because there a niche segment of learners will probably remain regardless of how standardized the instruction becomes. Afterall, traditional is still used in Hong Kong and in overseas communities too.

So, if Taiwan establishes itself as a niche learning alternative, then it will be less about struggling to compete 1-to-1 with language centers in mainland China.

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*I’ve not begun studying there yet, so I can only go by what I find via research.

[hansioux]

[quote=“yuli”]
My experience is that people whose native language is written in a phonemic/phonetic system often have certain difficulties learning the pronunciation of a second language using the same writing system because of interference from the writing system they think they already know,

Not surprisingly, native speakers of a language of which the associated writing system is either not phonemic/phonetic (e.g., Mandarin, Japanese to some extent) or which uses non-Latin characters (e.g., Korean, Japanese, Russian to some extent), encounter these additional difficulties when learning a third language - assuming here that the second and third language they learn both use the same writing system… second language pronunciation tends to interfere significantly with third language pronunciation (a textbook case of this is Japan: in students in school learn Latin letters as one of the tools with which one can represent Japanese sounds (ro:maji), and after that they learn English. Not surprising, most Japanese speak - definitely read - English with a ro:maji accent!
[/quote]

wow, that’s the best description on the phenomenon i’ve read!