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 [...]

Today I had my first Taiwanese language class at Shi-Da. Shi-Da offers the class as one of the cultural classes. They also have classes in calligraphy, name chop engraving and a few others. 
I have made sporadic efforts at studying Taiwanese but so far I haven't got beyond learning a few of the most common [...]

A while back I wrote about Chinese characters, or more precisely the Mandarin pronunciation thereof, being used to represent the Taiwanese language (台語). I recently discovered another interesting example of the reverse: the Taiwanese pronunciation of a character being used to represent a word in Mandarin. 
First, here's a brief language lesson. The word for internet [...]

In my Chinese class I have been regularly reading articles from the Guoyu Ribao (國語日報). I have always thought of the Guoyu Ribao as a somewhat anachronistic institution, dedicated to preserving Mandarin Chinese in a form that was spoken in China in the 1930s. This was reinforced during the time I was studying Qibai Zi [...]

As if the problem of romanising street signs in Taiwan wasn’t already bad enough, it seems that in Keelung (基隆) the situation is even worse. The problem is not over the use of Tongyong Pinyin, MPS 2 or any other variation that might be used in Taiwan. In Keelung some streets have their names romanised [...]

The Taipei Times today reports on the shambles the Ministry of Education have made of educating students to speak “native languages” (i.e. Taiwanese (aka Hoklo), Hakka and aboriginal languages).
No progress in native-language education has been made in schools despite the central government promising to encourage local culture and language education three years ago, native-language [...]