Not an online one. Anyone know of any paper ones that use Church Romanization? I know everyone hates CR but I am learning it through the Maryknoll books and cds and I am relatively used to it. I definitely want both T-E and E-T, but will settle for what I can find.
Thanks,
Bo han
TLI sells (well, at least used to) a lovely hardcover (but not too big) English>Taiwanese dictionary at a reasonable price. It’s amazingly comprehensive. I also have a hardcover Taiwanese>English dictionary which I got at taiwan e tiam (the Taiwanese and dialect store near the McDonald’s across from Taida on Hsinsheng Rd in Taipei).
Definitely check those two places. I think you will have luck doing so.
I live in Texas, but thanks anyways ironlady. At least I know now they exist.
Isn’t it crazy how hard it is to find Taiwanese language material?
The first thing I wanted to do when I got here was learn Taiwanese. Soon I discovered, there’s still no way to write it! I can’t believe I lived in Taiwan while some dentist in Taichung was creating the written form of Taiwanese to be used in schools. That’s historic! (crappy dentist, by the way). But how could Taiwanese go so long without a standard writing system? It just reflects Taiwan’s history as a colony - a place always occupied by powers who bring their ‘real languages’ to the island. And Taiwanese remains a mere dialect.
“A language is a dialect with an army and a navy.”
-Max Weinreich
Tell me about it! I ordered “Spoken Taiwanese”, and it is completely worthless. It has no grammatical explanations whatsoever, nor any repetition whatsoever. I think it will be valuable once I’ve made my way through the Maryknoll series as further practice, but beyond it isn’t a good starter for learning the language. Maryknoll is the only way to go, but I have read that “Spoken Amoy Hokkien” is a far better starter than “Spoken Taiwanese”, but the accent is quite different from any spoken in Taiwan.
It seems like missionairies in general make good language material. Someone on here, a previous Mormon if I remember correctly, says the Mormon books/tapes are excellent. I know another Mormon who lived in Taiwan for two years and his Mandarin was excellent. It makes sense. Missionairies really try to teach their students the language; many companies are just looking to package whatever crap they can in order to sell it and make a buck.
IMHO the Maryknoll stuff is currently the best on the market. They will mail to you if you ask them. I’d bet they could get their hands on the other dictionaries and include them in the package if you asked nicely! Why not give them a try?
(And on the difficulty of getting Taiwanese language materials – I was actually denied a visa way back when for wanting to study Minnan in Taiwan. OK it was not the brightest answer to give at the time but ever since I’ve had to mention that I have in fact been denied a visa one time. It really got old.)