Great series, thank you!

Very clear pronunciation and very systematic. At first I ignored the subtitles until I realized that they are pretty close to the original and I can use them to pick up words I did not get. Subscribed! :-)

Like you said, the climate has changed a lot ... when I first wanted to learn Hokkien, there were no teaching materials to be found anywhere online ... one single discussion forum and apart from that it was Douglas' dictionary from the 1800s (picked up in Singapore after a lot of searching), maybe the occasional 方言辭典 in a dusty corner of a bookstore's language section. Now there are even two iphone apps (one by the MOE) and several cool websites - but so far I had not found any video series. Thanks for sharing!

Best,

Aurelio

I actually didn't know about POJ.  I wrote my short sentence by googling and copying Aurelio's original post.  I found a nice website (itaigi.tw) that translates Chinese into Taiwanese with writing and pronunciation.  

Aurelio, I read your notebook entry.  That's a very good reason to learn a new language. :)

Your knowledge of the writing system is very impressive.  I've always been complacent in just understanding Tai-gi.  Tai-gi and other Taiwanese 方言 (in Taiwan it's also called 鄉土語言) like Hakka have been getting a revival in the last two decades because of changes in the political climate.  I heard some elementary schools are teaching Tai-gi now, with textbooks and everything, so the writing system is bound to become more and more developed and widely known. 

There's a series on Taiwan's Formosa TV channel that teaches Tai-gi that you may be interested in:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLe8vfIFNtjRcbTvj_qwwwxbaaeIukdZTE

Hi Jack,

Gladly :-). It's a slightly modified Péh-oē-jī (白話字, POJ), originally developed for Minnan in the 1800s. While there are many other systems, POJ is the only one with a substantial body of dictionaries, grammars, textbooks etc. Here is the Wikipedia article, for starters: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pe%CC%8Dh-%C5%8De-j%C4%AB. Lin also has a good description in his "Taiwanese Grammar: A Concise Reference".

POJ is very close to the International Phonetic Alphabet: voiced [b] (boy) is b while voiceless unaspirated [p] (北) is /p/ and aspirated [p'] (平) is /ph/. This allows POJ to transcribe Minnan voiced b and g properly (gû-bah 牛肉). Unfortunately, Pinyin went a different way with [p'] = /p/ and [p] = /b/ (some 拼音-based systems use bb, gg, or bh, gh). The POJ tone marks may seem a bit counter-intuitive, at first: 陰: 花 hoe 好 hó 去 khì 國 kok 陽: 人 lâng 美 bí 會 ē 食 chiáh. They make sense, though, if you think of the tones in combination (e.g. falling ó turns into rising in hó-chiáh 好食 etc.）.

Hope this helps! While I believe that 漢字 are the best way to transcribe Hokkien, a consistent romanization system is important to make dictionaries and textbooks ;-). Let me know if there is more I can help with!

Cheers,

Aurelio

Hi Wei,

Awesome, thank you (and your dad)! This (逐擺) sounds so much better, and you're right about the English part, too :).

About the question itself - yeah, I can see why it confuses people, especially after all the 說國語, 講華語, etc. campaigns of the last century. Actually, I think there is a whole lot of good reasons - wrote a notebook post about it the other day ;-).

Ａ big obstacle to people taking Hokkien / Tâigí more seriously is the difficulty in writing it. You said you were not fluent, but your POJ is super-標準 ^.^

Thanks again,

Aurelio

That's what I would ask too if someone who doesn't live in Taiwan told me he's learning Taiwanese. :)

I'm not qualified to answer your question since I'm not fluent myself and I have no idea how to type in Taiwanese, but it looks like not a lot of Taiwanese people read the discussion section, so I'll give your question a try. 

My dad's native language is Taiwanese, so I asked him how he would say what you're asking.  He said it's more natural to say "every time I tell people..." 

每次我跟人講...

ta̍k-pái goá ka lâng kóng... 

In this case, I think it's the same when you think about it in English.  It's more natural to say "whenever I tell people..." than to say "no matter who I tell..."