I feel nostalgic listening to the conversation. Came to the US only months old. Parents conversed at home partly in Taiwanese, partly in Japanese (from the occupation), but once i started public school, my Taiwanese fell by the wayside. My vocabulary is stunted at about the toddler level but this brings back memories of the sound of the conversations that flowed around me during family gatherings. I'm in my 50s now, both parents are gone and the two cousins i kept in touch with who were fluent have died. On a lark, i played this video and admittedly it was so hard to follow along, only snagging a few words here and there that i understood. Yet as i reached the end of the video, the words were flowing over my ears more organically (does this even make sense??) and the rhythm became more familiar. Interestingly, it's harder to follow while looking at the subtitles. my preference was to look away and just listen, and then i felt i followed the gist better. Of course I'd peek now and then to be sure the i got the word right since my vocabulary is rudimentary, but overall i felt some of it "coming back to me", kinda/sorta. Thank you for the video. It's an invaluable bit of my heritage. My kids only know how to say lie down, sit down, and take a bath. I've clearly failed to pass it on😣
@pandabear1534 жыл бұрын
Thank you so much for the English subtitles! You amaze me that you have complete understanding of the Tai yi language. As a second generation American I can only speak English. Many Native indigenous people here are also trying to revitalize their languages! Wishing you all success!!!
I love the English and Taiwanese subtitles! My parents speak some Taiwanese at home, so I can understand a bit of Taiwanese, but not much. I'm always looking for Taiwanese content with English subs, so this was perfect!! Your work with Taiwanese is inspirational~
@jared-gc5lw4 жыл бұрын
I'm third kind of people you mentioned, even Taiwanese is my mother tongue but i dont know how to write it down. As the rise of cultural awareness, I realize there are more and more people notice the importance of Taiwanese. Anyway, appreciated what you have done for this beautiful language ! ^.^
@AiongTaigi4 жыл бұрын
As your mother tongue you can become literate very easily using Lomaji. Give it a try! ^_^
@geoffchen68454 жыл бұрын
Thank you for adding the English subtitles on the bottom. It is extremely helpful for us American born Taiwanese speakers to learn more words. Much appreciated!
@張博閎-h3j4 жыл бұрын
小時候看天天開心,台語也可以學很快!哈哈!XDD
@debraphillip23942 жыл бұрын
看黃俊雄布袋戲學著大部分e台語文言音,聽吳樂天講古學著大量e古台語字彙
@mesaquecaiu4 жыл бұрын
A-hui lau-su is great! Every time she shows up, we learn something new. Great questions as well.
@blaclFIREpolo4 жыл бұрын
好特別的節目 謝謝你的製作!
@Rio-nf5uo3 жыл бұрын
Love your channel ❤️ there is so much to learn... Thank you for sharing, 阿勇 ☺️ More power to your channel!!! 🎉🎉🎉
@patiencegives4 жыл бұрын
Thank you Aiong, you are amazing. I really appreciate you.
Taiwanese American here. I found the English subtitles helpful. Will you be doing a future video on how you learned Taiwanese?
@AiongTaigi4 жыл бұрын
Hm, not sure there's much for a video, but interesting idea...
@ming-hueilam1233 жыл бұрын
Love the idea!
@alikoubrujup_Trump20244 жыл бұрын
Taigi Ro maji is quite interesting to learn. We used to communicate with friends via Whatapp messages, example, " ciak pah boi" ( have you eaten? ), " lu cho hah mik" ( what are you doing), mah zai nang ki lim teh ( tomorrow we go drink tea) etc, without adopting Standard Taigi Romaji system (which is really looks good to learn). So "ciak pah boi" should read "chia̍h-pá boeh", perhaps. Tâi-gí hàn-jī is also a very unique and beautiful, love it so much. ♥️♥️ Since Taigi was promoted as National Language status (thanks to the above Mdm Lee(,Ms Momo plus others), persistently advocate for promoting, preserving and maintaining Taigi, as National language and establishment of Taigi TV station-Kong Si Taigi Tai) , as a language to learn in schools, it is good to introduce both Hanji and Romaji system. ( Like Japanese Hiragana and Kanji). As long as, Taigi , a compulsory language to be learned in schools, we will see it blooming in the future. Who knows one day, it will become an official language, WHY not???? 💪💪💪💪💪💪💪💪 Note: Thank you, Aióng for your consistent support and promoting Taigi ( we called it Hokkien gu). Our hope is that Tâi-gí won't be a "museum" language 🙏🙏🙏 I like your slogan printed on your T-shirt, " Please speak Tâi-gí with me" - "Chhíaⁿ kah góa kóng Tâi-gí " is really a fantastic method to promote daily usage of Tâi-gí !!🙏🙏♥️♥️💪💪
@AiongTaigi4 жыл бұрын
Thanks for your kind words 🙂 Chia̍h-pá bōe? 🍜
@alikoubrujup_Trump20244 жыл бұрын
@@AiongTaigi chia̍h kah pá-tong-tong 😊😊😊😊
@Kaku-t5x3 жыл бұрын
阿勇是我學台語的楷模
@郭采采-u6j3 жыл бұрын
阿勇真有心 嘠你按讚
@gyanfranciskumar3 жыл бұрын
Amazing content. Started today learning phonics on your channel, after practicing consonants I listen to content in Taiwanese to "get used to the language". And just by watching this video, with Lomaji and English subtitles, I realized if you already know mandarin, you already can guess a lot of chinese characters just by listening and knowing (via the english subtitles) the context. So knowing Chinese characters actually helps you assimilating Lomaji, they are not mutually exclusive. On the contrary, being able to guess the Chinese characters for at least vocabulary that is shared between Taiwanese and Mandarin, is actually a powerful "crutch", so to speak. I am now fully convinced that Lomaji are the way to go, ESPECIALLY if you know Chinese characters (however counter-intuitive it might seem). I am so grateful to you, Aiong, for systematizing in such a passionate and intelligent manner this language for us Taigi learners. Thank you and keep up the great work, you got yourself a new disciple!
@AiongTaigi3 жыл бұрын
Glad you are enjoying it. But I do hope you'll consider my advice carefully: what you are doing is playing a game called "guessing Mandarin characters", and I can tell you after making the same mistake for years that it is *not* conducive to learning Taiwanese. Characters are fine, don't get me wrong, but they are *not* useful for learning the language in the way that they are for Mandarin. Taiwanese is *traditionally* written in Lomaji. The "new" character-based system (sponsored by the MOE) is largely based on Mandarin, which is why you feel like there is some kind of "compatibility". Of course, there are plenty of *traditional* Taiwanese characters as well - which the MOE ignores, since their system is based on Mandarin - but the traditional Taiwanese characters are *not* guessable by knowing Mandarin characters. So what's the problem? Just use the MOE characters for compatibility, right? That's what I used to think too, because that's how they teach it. But it couldn't be more wrong. The reality is: when you see "Taiwanese" written in the MOE-style Mandarin-based characters, it is *usually* poor Taiwanese. Not always (sometimes it's very good), but *usually*. The best Taiwanese is consistently written in Lomaji. There's a reason for that. If you try to convert those Lomaji Taiwanese into characters, based on your knowledge of Mandarin, you will get *almost nowhere* since probably 50% or more of the words simply "don't match". It's like a totally different language when written in Lomaji vs. written in Mandarin-based characters. And the "traditional Taiwanese characters" are very different, impossible to guess for Mandarin speakers. So if you take my book (Gínná Ôngchú, a 2004 translation of the Little Prince, originally translated into Lomaji) and compare to a more recent 2018 translation called 小王子 (Sió Ông-tsú), you can see exactly what I'm talking about. Even just from the title of the book. You can guess the book title easier by knowing that it's called 小王子 (Xiao Wang Zi) in Mandarin. But Taiwanese does not have an adjective 小 SIÓ meaning "little". The title of the "Taiwanese" version called 小王子 is in fact *not Taiwanese* but Mandarin (Xiao Wang Zi) read *as if* it were Taiwanese. It isn't. But if you know characters, you might find it "easier". Except you're learning the wrong language! The contents of the book continue on in that fashion page after page. You might actually be able to "read" 小王子 (Sió Ông-chú) by guessing based on knowledge of Mandarin. But you won't be able to read a word of Gínná Ôngchú, even though there is also a Hanji version (囝仔王子) unless you actually know Taiwanese. Mandarin knowledge will not help. And if you read a passage to a native speaker from each book, I can guarantee you that 100% of the time they will say that the passage in Gínná Ôngchú sounds natural and easy to understand, while the same in 小王子 sounds clunky and difficult, or isn't Taiwanese at all. All of that is to say, there's a very important reason I have specifically taken the Hanji *off* of my Taiwanese learning videos. They are fine, *once you already know the language*, but trying to learn the language through characters is a big mistake, which I sincerely hope you will be able to avoid.
@gyanfranciskumar3 жыл бұрын
@@AiongTaigi Thank you so much for your advice! I wonder why Taiwanese is such a unicorn, but I guess it being so unique is what makes its charm. Cantonese speakers use characters only and seem to have no problem, is the lack of a standard Taiwanese script (in characters) the result of many years of government negligence? Do Hokkien speakers in Fujian use the same Lomaji system as the Taiwanese do? Thanks again and have a great day!
@AiongTaigi3 жыл бұрын
@@gyanfranciskumar I don't know what Hokkien speakers use for writing. My guess is they simply don't write much. Taiwanese appears "unique" because it's most likely not a very strongly Sinitic language, if it's Sinitic at all. From what I understand, Cantonese is much more "clearly Sinitic" than Taiwanese. Taiwanese might be more closely related to Vietnamese (which switched from characters to Romanization like 150 years ago, around the same time Taiwanese started to). It's kind of an open question AFAIK. The lack of a standardized writing system today is due mainly to ~40 years of Chinese Martial Law, during which Taiwanese was forbidden from most of public life, education, etc. The writing systems (both of them, Romanization and Hanji) were well on the way to full standardization by the late Japanese era.
@gyanfranciskumar3 жыл бұрын
@@AiongTaigi That's insane that the Nationalists back then were more inimical to the development of Taiwanese than the Japanese colonizers ! I see my big mistake was to consider Taiwanese Hokkien as just "another Sinitic language/dialect", I will henceforth approach it like, as you said, one would approach Vietnamese, in a fully Romanized mindset.
@AiongTaigi3 жыл бұрын
@@gyanfranciskumar Awesome, good to hear! (BTW, Taiwanese Hanji - not Mandarin Hanji - are also fine, so feel free to come back to them later if you like. But that's *after* you get comfortable with the language & Romanization.)
If you want Taiwanese to become more important to learn, try to make it more common. It could be a good way to start asking companies like Microsoft, Apple and Google to provide the Taiwanese language in their operating systems for example.
@bluelan72533 жыл бұрын
阿勇太強了!
@htchd02113 жыл бұрын
góa siōng-ài a-hūi ê tâi-gí chiat-bo̍k!
@andrelee12014 жыл бұрын
Múi chit- pái thia(n) lí kóng tâi-gí hō͘ gún chi̍t ê chin tōa ê tong-lat lâi kè-siok oh
@AiongTaigi4 жыл бұрын
Chán! Ka-iû!
@beanielux33653 жыл бұрын
Thank you so much for this video it’s really helpful
@kohim-gi70074 жыл бұрын
A-hūi lāu-su chán
@luke8710164 жыл бұрын
Sī a hūi chiá!! Góa khòaⁿ chiok chē in tī Kong-sī ê kàu-ha̍k ê. 13:08 ê "iā-pô sit-bîn" ōe pún góa mā ū khòaⁿ kòe. Ū-kàu kó͘-chui ê.
I am a Filipino-Chinese with Hokkien ancestry whose generation has almost lost its ability to speak the dialect. I am now 38 yo, based in Kaohsiung for a year for training and I am trying to catch up and regain fluency in Mandarin and hopefully some basic conversational Taiyu. Your fluency is so impressive. Learning both Mandarin and Taiyu at the same time however is a bit confusing, especially as to how to write words in Taiyu (for instance via SMS or messaging apps). My main question is whether it is necessary to first master Mandarin and chinese characters in order to learn Taiyu, or should I learn them exclusive of each other? As in Mandarin, many similar sounding words have the same meaning so the characters help me for Mandarin. Likewise, is the grammatical structure in Mandarin the same or similar as in Taiyu? As in one of the comments below, the romanized Taiyu and intonations are quite challenging to follow coming from Pinyin, but i guess it is more widely used and understood? Can we assume that native Taiyu speakers can understand (phone) messages written that way or are chinese characters still preferred? Apologies for all the questions and thank you for your patience.
@AiongTaigi4 жыл бұрын
I recommend learning and treating them separately. Of course there is overlap in vocab, grammar, etc, but it's not enough to make learning them "together" make sense. Many of the basic grammar points and such do not overlap, so you can often end up with very Mandarin-sounding Taiwanese going that route. (Of course, try to recognize the similarities and use them to your advantage, but that is itself a separate task in a sense.) I strongly recommend focusing the majority of your time and effort on Lomaji (romanization), and using Hanji only "as a point of reference". Taiwanese Hanji are complicated, non-standardized, and generally useless until you achieve some degree of fluency in the language. Lomaji alone can get you to that point much more easily. Unfortunately, the majority of Taiwanese speakers are fully illiterate, whether Lomaji or Hanji. They tend write Taiwanese in "Martian" (using Mandarin readings of Hanji to approximate Taiwanese sounds), but they are already native speakers of both languages. That style of writing is almost entirely useless for a learner. There are plenty of FB groups, Twitter circles, etc., which focus on writing in Lomaji or various other ways of writing Taiwanese. You can use those for interaction and practice, since you likely won't be able to use it in text with most people.
@AldO-HPB4 жыл бұрын
@@AiongTaigi Thank you so much for your very prompt, comprehensive and definitely very helpful response! May I ask how long you have been in Taiwan to have gained such mastery? I just subscribed to your channel and will take time to watch your videos. I just completed your pronunciation part 1 video, which already helps. I haven't watched the others, but like this particular video, I hope others will have subtitles too which i can use to decipher meanings from. Actually I am training in a hospital and often times, my colleagues often speak to each other and with patients in Taiyu so i've felt it a waste of learning opportunity not to understand the discussions. Anyway, thank you once again for your advice and insights! 🙏
@rocchic4962 жыл бұрын
Hi Aoing, I really appreciate your videos and special guests who are helping people get an insight and history into Taiwanese. It was interesting and fascinating to learn that there's a written form of Taiwanese and that it's Romanization. I noticed there is a dialect (?) difference for the word 'year'. I learned from my A-ma to say it as "ni", but you and your guests (and others on various Taiwanese videos) say "dan". I wonder if it's regional. I am a bit confused by the fact that some of the sounds such as "D" are written with "T" (ex. Tai-gi) and "G" are written with "K" (ex. Kong), though. I hope you'll be able to clarify this if you happen to see my comment. Thank you!
@AiongTaigi2 жыл бұрын
tang is "a year", nî is "the year" For example: 3 years = 3 tang the year 1900 = 1900 nî (Some people use nî for both, particularly in the north, but it's technically different.) Taiwanese "t" is the same as International Phonetic Alphabet [t], or Mandarin ㄉ. The aspirated sound is "th" (Mandarin ㄊ). Taiwanese does not use the letter "d", but the letter "l" is basically a [d] sound.
@lilyho49503 жыл бұрын
第一次有女老師來上課
@familystones4 жыл бұрын
I hope to move back to Taiwan to Tainan. Do you have a Taiwanese language school you recommend for english speakers in that area?
@AiongTaigi4 жыл бұрын
For sure - I suggest contacting the NCKU Dept of Taiwanese Literature. If there is a beginners course at NCKU or any other courses in and around Taiwan, I'm sure they will know. Their website is here: www.twl.ncku.edu.tw/index.php?Lang=en If the department general mailbox doesn't respond, contact the Dept. Chair directly, he's a very nice guy and I'm sure he'll help you out :)
@familystones4 жыл бұрын
阿勇台語 Aiong Taigi thank you so much! God bless you!
@DaphneLeeKaohsiung4 жыл бұрын
@@AiongTaigi Then, do you have any suggestion (Taigi courses) in Kaohsiung?
@chunglunyuen61894 жыл бұрын
頭香yay
@CeliaGoh4 жыл бұрын
tbh, i prefer to express the language in 漢字 than its romanised form.. it just comes more natural and intuitive to me to use chinese character for chinese languages.. furthermore it makes me appreciate the beauty if chinese language as a whole, since many ancient /middle chinese vocabs are retained in the language.. for example, 箸 instead of 筷子 i learnt hanyu pinyin since young, so tâi-gí romanisation really confuses the hell out of me😂😂 not just the spelling, but the intonation notation as well.. reading speed is affected too since i have to vocalise each word to know what it is🙈🙈 many a times, i don’t even know if i spelled it right when it comes to writing.. i have two Tâi-gí keyboards installed on my phone, and they sometimes suggested different spelling😭 the other downside of using romanisation even if the system is standardised is that there are different accents.. same word would be spelled differently at different regions.. this can be easily overcome if hàn-jī is used
@AiongTaigi4 жыл бұрын
Thanks for taking the time to share your thoughts! You wrote a lot, so I wanted to give a thorough response. I actually started learning Taiwanese with exactly the same opinions that you've listed here. See my early videos from 2016, all using Hanji. I will make a full video about Hanji soon, but here are some points to think about in the meantime: - Hanji are "natural and intuitive" only after studying for many, many years in school as children. As Honghui says in the interview, for most of Taiwan's history there was no comprehensive national school system and people didn't spend years studying and memorizing Hanji. (Not to mention the problems associated with an education system entirely based around rote memorization, IMO largely due to the need to memorize Hanji.) - A Taiwanese speaker can learn romanization in a few hours, and read / write fluently after a few days or weeks of practice, vs. years for Hanji. This is why romanization was the preferred method for well over 100 years in Taiwan, and nearly 200 years if we look at other Hokkien speaking diaspora around SE Asia. - Reading speed is affected because you're not used to it. It's just habit and training. Personally, after practicing reading romanization I can read it much faster than Hanji. Of course I have a different background (English), but I have heard this from many Taiwanese as well. - Reading by sounding things out is a very normal, natural way to read that almost every language in the world uses. Check "subvocalization" on Wikipedia. I'm sure that to an extent it is also used in reading Hanji. - About the keyboards, probably one is set to Pehoeji by default and one to Tailo. There are 2 different popular romanizations, I made a video about them a few months ago. - Regarding accents, every language in the world has accents. A writing system is not going to change this, even a phonetic one. Even the many varieties of English have different pronunciations and spellings for words, and English spelling was only really "standardized" in recent times. - On the other hand, I have heard from many Taiwanese that romanization allows them to "feel" like they can write in their own accent, and not be "standardized away" through non-phonetic writing of Hanji. Arguably, Hanji have been largely responsible for the "Mando-fication" of Taiwanese in recent couple of decades, precisely due to the fact that it's a very poor system for representing sounds in multiple languages, dialects, accents, etc. Of course, I understand that many people share your views, including me a few years ago. And Taiwan is a free country, so people can think as they choose and write as they choose. It seems to me that, after fully understanding and spending a lot of time on this topic, most people choose romanization. That goes for me as well. My personal opinions changed, but only after using both Hanji and romanizations extensively for a few years, and interacting with the people who are literate and frequently read and write in Taiwanese.
@CeliaGoh4 жыл бұрын
阿勇台語 Aiong Taigi I wish I could give your reply multiple likes, thanks for the insights! I just came across this video on my feed, but I’ll definitely check out your other videos! Thanks for the recommended resources too! Really really appreciate your effort in promoting Tâi-gí, it makes me feel so humbled not being able to speak my mother tongue fluently.. blame the education system, I despised Hokkien so much when I was younger, that I refused to speak any ‘dialects’ other than Mandarin and English. (I’m raised in a Hokkien/Hakka/Teochew-speaking community with heavy Taiwanese media influence). But you’re right, opinions change.. When I realise there’s hardly anyone around me who can speak my mother tongue (Hokkien in tsiàu-an accent) anymore, then only I decided to pick up the language😅 After digesting your points, I’m still not very convinced that Hanji should be abandoned entirely.. Eager to see your video on this topic! Maybe there can be a system where Hanji and romanisation coexist.. Hanji is generally used for writing and romanisation to supplement the nuances in accents🤔🤔 just my two cents 😬 But before all that, guess I should invest more time to familiarise with romanisation.. 😂 Practice makes perfect! ✌🏼
@DaphneLeeKaohsiung4 жыл бұрын
@@CeliaGoh Also multiple likes to Aiong😘 This is not only for language learning, so many cultural and political shocks...
@DaphneLeeKaohsiung4 жыл бұрын
Another two cents: some of my church friends (in their 70s - 80s) read POJ Bible. They can read it very fast and some of them don't know Mandarin characters (中文字) at all. Guess Aiong is right, practice makes perfect. I'll start one sentence a day from now on 😂
I've noticed that in the magazine, most of the articles are written in a combination of mostly Hán-jī with Lô-má-jī sprinkled in (though there are some full Lô-má-jī articles). It seems pretty hard since you have to learn both systems. I guess the Japanese have that sort of difficulty as well.
@AiongTaigi3 жыл бұрын
Yeah it's unfortunate but there's a bit of pressure within the magazine to go more and more ROC-style (mostly ROC Hanji, with a little bit of ROC PinYin). I think soon there probably won't be any full romanization articles at all.
@waynevevo45824 жыл бұрын
🥰🥰🥰
@eabaw4wrw3rqf724 жыл бұрын
hi aiong. even here in the ph, ban lam gi is endangered. what can you say about filipino chinese dialect of ban lam gi. because im not sure if i speak it properly or are the phonetics actually fundamentally different or something, bc the tones are different and we have some different vocabulary (not loan words) compared to taigi. even my grandfather from china doesnt speak like taiwanese accent of banlamgi. i forgot where in china hes from. i remembered hearing like piann chiu or something or chin kang. also, i noticed in our dialect/accent, we retain our ending gluttal stops all the time for ex: in taiwanese:"pha bo khi" we still say "phah bo khi". and the strange thing is from every hokkien family and friends here in the ph, we sound almost exactly the same tonally. do you know whats the actual name of my dialect?
@AiongTaigi4 жыл бұрын
Sorry but I don't know much about Ph. Hokkien. I saw someone recommend a KZbin channel for that: kzbin.info/door/H5qyQcBd6h76owK3IU2fmA Maybe a better place to ask?
@CeliaGoh4 жыл бұрын
i think the Ph variant is more heavily influenced by the tsuân-tsiu (where tsìn-kang is located) dialect/accent.. hence the difference with Tâi-gí
@方玲蓉3 жыл бұрын
地方的阿桑,感覺高手在民間! 阿勇~免擱找半桶水=
@henwang4 жыл бұрын
Hello my friend. How can I msg you in order to get some help about Tai-gi. I am from a taiwanese community in Brazil and member of Taiwanese Presbiteryan Church and the sermons are preched in Tai-gi.
@AiongTaigi4 жыл бұрын
Please message via FB fanpage or email: aiongtaigi at gmail dot com.
Swiss German also doesn't have "writings" or grammar. They teach Hoch Deutch in schools.
@黃羿翔-b6d4 жыл бұрын
希望阿勇可以跟蔡阿嘎合作~
@AiongTaigi4 жыл бұрын
你會當kā問看覓,我無hit ê通路neh XD
@luibenghan4 жыл бұрын
Do not lower the standard of this channel.
@twngrc26044 жыл бұрын
Using the “Phah Taigi” how to find the word “Taiwan”? I can easily find “Tâi” but having trouble to find the rest
@AiongTaigi4 жыл бұрын
Tâi-oân
@twngrc26044 жыл бұрын
I have trouble with the “u” or “ou” sound because I tried “u-an” “ou-an” all came up with nothing, did not know it is from “oan”, now to say thank you to you, I was confused, to input “do” or what else but finally find it under the “t” sound. So “to siā”, I need more practice...
@AiongTaigi4 жыл бұрын
You can check my Taigi Phonics series to learn the sounds for each letter. That will be a lot easier ;)