Most useless book I have seen
A Vietnamese-Taiwanese language workbook. But the Taiwanese portion is all in romanized Taiwanese, which I have yet to meet a single Taiwanese who can understand.
Wait. I met one Taiwanese guy who could, a Christian. Because the Bible is translated to Taiwanese in that system.
I guess Linguistics professors in Taiwan need something to do for their research grants. I feel sorry for the Vietnamese mail-order bride who is trying to use this book to learn Taiwanese.
7 comments:
I must disagree with you about the book's uselessness. It may appear useless to someone who already knows Hoklo Taiwanese or can't imagine that the language can be written without Chinese characters. However, I think you are looking at the problem from the wrong perspective.
If you are Vietnamese and don't read Chinese characters then romanised Taiwanese would be the easiest way to learn the language. Vietnamese also uses the Roman alphabet so learning the new phonetics for Taiwanese would not be so difficult. It would certainly be much faster than trying to learn Chinese characters.
That is a very good point except that when the Vietnamese person tries to ask a question about how to pronounce some word, then the Taiwanese person will not be able to help.
It would be like a Taiwanese person learning English via a book using bopomofo spelling or KK. No one except a teacher will no what you are referring to, so it is not as helpful as it would seem.
If the book had Chinese characters below the dialogue so the Taiwanese person could figure out what was going on it would be useful.
Oh, and I showed it to several Taiwanese who could not figure anything out about what it was saying. I did better than they did at guessing what the Taiwanese phrases were.
The book (if it's the Maryknoll series I'm thinking of) is designed to be used in a classroom environment with a competent teacher of Taiwanese. There are also CDs which accompany the book to aid with pronunciation.
I see your point about the lack of Mandarin glosses for the romanized Taiwanese but I think that two points account for the reason Mandarin is not included. Firstly, the romanization system (most likely Peh-oe-ji in this case) is completely regular - there are no exceptions (unlike the esoteric spelling of English), meaning that the system can be picked up with a couple of weeks study, obviating the need to ask anyone for pronunciation help.
The second is that if you did put Mandarin glosses under the Taiwanese, those glosses would not have a one-to-one correspondence with the Taiwanese. For example, the gloss 誰 could be used to represent si-mih-lang, sia-mih-lang, sia-lang, siang, chia or sahⁿ-lang. OK then, you might say, just write the Taiwanese in Chinese characters, rather than providing a translation in Mandarin. The problem with this idea is that there is no standardised way to write Taiwanese using Chinese characters - many are either made up on the spot, or borrowed for a similar sound, or simply just written out in romanization.
The unfortunate fact is that most Taiwanese people cannot read the language competently in any form - whether it be romanized, characters or any other system (of which there are several).
I found the book sitting on a table at a factory in Vietnam. It was not a Mary Knoll book.
It even had major explanatory sections in English and was written by a linguistics type, as it included a large amount of technical explanations. That can be very useful for a teacher, so if it was taught as part of a specific program where the teacher understood the Taiwanese romanization, then I think it would be okay, but even then, I prefer workbooks that non-teachers can access to help the learner.
This would be especially true if it were a Vietnamese bride in Taiwan - maybe less so for a Taiwanese in Vietnam learning (as the Vietnamese section would be intelligible to anyone asked.)
Again, would you recommend someone in Taiwan learn English with KK only in the lesson book?
But really, should all of you be trying to convince me that this book is actually useful sight unseen? I mean, how many shitty English books have we all seen?
OTOH, I looked at the book for about 5 minutes, and showed it to some Taiwanese co-workers to get a laugh as they tried to read Taiwanese. So maybe its not as bad as I imagined.
If your Veitnamese wife would like to study Chinese. There are classes that meet at Beitun elementary once a week for two hours. For those of you that don't know Veitnamese women learn Chinese very quickly because their language is also tonal.
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