Learn Taiwanese

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Introduction to the Lessons

The Taiwanese lessons are written on the assumption that many people interested in Taiwanese either have at least a basic understanding of Mandarin or are descendants of Taiwanese and have had some exposure to the language. For these assumptions, this site not only includes English translations, but the Mandarin equivalents in characters including the Taiwanese in characters. This is to help students of Mandarin learn quicker by noticing the similarities between the two. If you are not Taiwanese-descended and don't know Mandarin or any other Chinese language or dialect, you can also use this website to learn Taiwanese, but you will definitely find it challenging. The lessons focus on building vocabulary, providing sample sentences and conversations starting from the simple and building you up through various kinds of daily life situations, and also cover doing business in Taiwanese which include also a large number of business terminology.

If you are just starting, it is strongly recommended you start with a review of the pronunciation and romanization system first, then go through the tone practice. Tones are very important and if you get them wrong, nobody will understand you. The difference in tones are just as important as the difference a "t" and a "d" make in English. Replacing one with the other creates a completely different word, just like "bet" and "bed".

Some users may find trouble trying to view everything properly on the site. The site has been designed using Unicode encoding which can more accurately represent Taiwanese in romanized form, at the same time allowing the display of Chinese characters. Your browser should be able to display Unicode encoding, and you should have a Unicode font that includes Chinese and IPA characters. Generally speaking, the site has been designed for Windows 2000 and later. Some rare Chinese characters used in Taiwanese have not appeared until Unicode version 3.2. Very few people have fonts and browsers that can display these characters. I have encoded them anyway, anticipating the day we have the fonts and browsers to display them. But there are also many common words in Taiwanese whose Chinese characters have not been included in Unicode version 3.2. I'm trying to find an alternate solution to this.

Lessons 1-145

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