There really isn’t much difference between the two. Learn either one and spent 5 seconds and you’ve learned the other one as well.
The benefit of Tailo for me is that it’s more consistent and if someone wants to emphasize differences in accents they can. The benefit of POJ of course is plenty literature have been written in it, even if most of the users were related to the church.
The point was to give people a pronunciation guide and not to argue one is better than the other. If one is starting out it can be confusing. For the more modern resources I see Tai Luo more often, but then there are also other learning resources where authors seem to make up their own version which is frustrating.
Here’s an equivalent chart:
That chart is incomplete
| IPA | TL | POJ |
|---|---|---|
| t͡s | ts | ch |
| t͡sʰ | tsh | chh |
| ɔ | oo | o͘ |
| ua | ua | oa |
| uai | uai | oai |
| ue | ue | oe |
| i̯əŋ | ing | eng |
| iŋ | ing | ing |
| ɛŋ | eng | - |
| i̯ək̚ | ik | ek |
| ik̚ | ik | ik |
| ɛk̚ | ek | - |
| ◌̃ | nn | ⁿ |
| ɨ | ir | - |
| ə | er | - |
| ɛ | ee | - |
I think i̯əŋ/iŋ/ɛŋ and i̯ək̚/ik̚/ɛk̚ are dialectal differences. There are some tonal marker differences, such as the 9th tone is marked as a̋ in TL and ă in POJ.
As for which vowel to place the tonal markers on, TL doesn’t have exceptions, it’s always a > oo > (e = o) > (i = u) and on the vowel letter not the glide. For POJ it’s o＞e＞a＞u＞i＞ng＞m but for oai, oan, oat, and oah the tonal mark is on the a, and for oeh it’s on the e.
Yes I’m aware. That’s from the cover of POJ dictionary.
The other helpful thing on the pronunciation chart is the tone changes. I found myself referring back to that until I got used to them.
I’m compiling a list of words combinations such as those on the bottom right of the chart for pronunciation practice. I’ll start a thread here for that.
Yeah, tonal sandhi is the toughest part of learning Taigi for me as well. I like the repeating words examples on your cheat sheet. I first learned that trick from @greves youtube videos. Much more intuitive than the tonal chart.
My version:
I only used words with slightly negative connotations.
I’ve watched all his videos as well.
I have a text book with a list of the repeated word for each of the sandhi combinations, and I’d like to compile a list here of the most useful/common ones you hear in everyday conversation.
On another note, I read through the entire thread you posted. Most of my resources come from the MOE so everything is in 台羅 and 台文, or I guess 阿勇 would call this 台閩文。 I have a book of short stories all written in what they refer to as 台文 with vocabulary introductions, and a link for each story read out loud on YouTube.
Here’s an example:
When I first tried to learn Taigi, it was still CSB time, and back then the situation was even more chaotic. The TLPA came from scholars trying to address some of the issues that TL later addressed. Back then Unicode hasn’t been widely adopted, and tonal marks won’t be displayed unless custom fonts are installed, so TLPA was pushing for just writing the tones as numbers, while a number of other systems were pushing for using unused alphabets as tonal marks, such as f, r, x, like MLT. There are other systems that stray even further away from POJ, like using b for p, and p for ph, such as Tongyong.
So in 2005 the POJ people and the TLPA people (most linguists) figured it’s better if they work together and get a standard through. They scrapped the arabic number tonal marks from TLPA and got mored aligned with IPA, then replaced o͘ and ⁿ with oo and nn, since that’s how you would type them anyway.
While the system was being hammered out, it was just called the Taiwanese Romanization System, Tâi-uân Lô-má-jī Phing-im Hong-àn, hence TL. The Minnan part was added because the legislature will decide whether or not TL or Tongyong will be the system taught in schools. In the end Tongyong lost, and TL (POJ+TLPA) won.
The Taigi spoken in this video is absolutely beautiful.
Maybe a bit tangential, but does anyone know of an updated IPA chart for Taigi? The one on wikimedia commons is based on Ernest Tipson’s version, and has some glaring inaccuracies IMO - for instance, it claims that POJ /j/ as in /ji7/ meaning “two” (sorry, current keyboard can’t do tones) should be an alveolar affricate or fricative, which does not match with what I’ve heard in both Taigi and Taiwanese Mandarin. To me the initial consonant in e.g. 日 or 二 sounds more like [ʝ] than [d͡z] or [z].
Also, thanks all for the recommendations. I haven’t been responding but they have been very helpful! I also found a Chinese language learning discord that has a specific channel for Hokkien, and another whole discord dedicated just to Minnan languages. (I’ll try to link them if I remember later; out and about right now.)
Ultimately I ended up finding one-on-one classes at the Taipei language school. It’s heavily dependent (as with any language) on your teacher, but it was good to get a base in the pronunciation and the tones instead of practicing on my own. The current textbook they use is okay, it seems very Mandarin-ized; so not as ‘pure’ Taigi but perhaps closer to what most people speak nowadays. Regardless once I got a base in the pronunciation and tones it was just a matter of getting the gumption to go down to the chhai-chhi-a to practice.
Definitely doesn’t sound like [ʝ], it might sound more like [d͡ʑ]. It might be an accent thing, which in the north of the island they tend to pronounce the j like a l.
You’re right, what I hear is [ʑ]. I got tripped up because when I looked at the IPA consonant chart I saw it was written as [z] which I don’t think I’ve ever heard people say. When learning initially it took me the longest to figure out what sound /j/ was meant to refer to - in my experience I almost always hear it pronounced as [ʑ] but there’s definitely some variance. (In fact in Mandarin as well I’ve had people not understand me when I say [ɹ] for 日, and correct me by saying something like [ʑ].)
Which book are they using?
Is it this one? Looks like they made up their own romanization. I’ve found a few books where they just make stuff up. It’s annoying for anyone trying to be consistent.
Not that one for sure. I lent it to a friend and don’t have a picture on me but it was a yellow cover. As I said the vocab and dialogues left something to be desired (can’t remember specifics but imagine teaching things like 你好 instead of 食飽未) but the pronunciation and tone training was quite good. The books were consistent in using POJ and were aimed at English speakers without an assumption of any Mandarin level.
中英交流 Chinese-English Language Exchange - general language exchange for most/all Chinese languages, has channels for Cantonese, Hakka, Hokkien, Wu, Classical Chinese
Hokkien + Minguistic 閩語學堂 - link found via reddit
Just found this channel. It has videos of Japanese era Taigi textbooks for children.
The audio for the videos are generated by tts, but I still think it’s a pretty useful resource for learning basic grammar.
It seems to be related to this blog for short stories in POJ, Hanlo and English.
Despite fewer young people in Taiwan speaking Taiwanese Hokkien, Taipei band Lilium makes the language and local culture a focal point of their music.
If you get the book back, please share a photo of it or the name 
