David on Formosa

I had my last Taiwanese class for the semester at Shi-Da today. I enjoyed the class a lot, but only studying once a week I didn't really make much progress. Still I learnt some new words and had fun. 

The amount of materials for learning the Taiwanese language* is quite limited. I have only used a couple of books myself. I have written some brief notes about them here and also some other resources. 

The first Taiwanese textbook I had was Shenghuo Taiyu (生活台語). This book contains no English, but I think anyone who has studied Chinese to intermediate level should be able to comprehend it. The conversations and vocabulary are written in Standard Chinese, Taiwanese using Chinese characters and POJ (Church Romanisation).

The conversations in the book cover fairly simple topics like introductions, talking about where you live and shopping. The book has a set of tapes to accompany it. These days I don't even own a tape player so I need to get the tapes converted to mp3 files. 

This semester at Shi-Da I have used the materials written by Xiao Laoshi (蕭老師). The conversations in this book are interesting and sometimes even funny. They are very much related to the common things one encounters in daily life in Taiwan. Some of the topics include visiting a night market, summer vacation, typhoons and surfing the internet. Xiao Laoshi also provided a CD with audio files of all the conversations in the book. 

The image is of part of the first conversation in the book. It is written in Taiwanese using Chinese characters, standard Chinese and POJ without tone marks or numbers. The teacher gave us all the vocabulary during the lesson so we could add the tone marks if we needed to.  

The Maryknoll books are also commonly recommended. These books are published by the Maryknoll Institute which has a long history of teaching the Taiwanese language. I have not studied these books in detail, but they use English and POJ. 

The Maryknoll books and some other Taiwanese language learning materials and dictionaries can be bought from the Tai-uan e Tiam (台灣e店) near NTU. The address is No. 6 Lane 76 Section 3 Xinsheng South Road, Taipei City (台北市新生南路三段76巷6號).

A number of online resources for learning Taiwanese can be found. Taffy's blog, Phai-se, hasn't been updated for a long time, but contains a few helpful articles. I came across a pdf file of Taiwanese language learning resources. Taiwanderful has a page about learning Taiwanese including a list of links. There is also a page about writing Taiwanese using Chinese characters. I wrote this to help overcome the common misunderstanding that there is no difference between writing Taiwanese and Mandarin using Chinese characters. 

* I use the term Taiwanese language (台語). The language is also referred to as Hoklo, Hokkein or Minnan (閩南語).