I am no longer updating this blog

I have left Taiwan for Japan, and I will not be adding new posts.  I have some older cartoons and other random entries that I may get around to posting someday, but not until fall 2011 at the earliest.

Taiwanese Version of the Four Books

A friend of mine just sent me a link to a website that has the full text of the Four Books (四書, which includes Confucius, Mencius, The Great Learning, and The Doctrine of the Mean) in Taiwanese. The site uses the official Tai-lo system, and it also includes recordings in Taiwanese for each entry (just click on the “Classical Pronunciation” (古語發音) hyperlink on the bottom right of the page).

Happy Fourth of July

To my American readers

Basic Minnan Text on Wikibooks

I never even knew about Wikibooks until yesterday, but there are a couple of chapters of a beginner-level Minnan text there.  It would be hard for a true beginner to use since it does not include sound files, but it might be useful to people interested in learning a little about basic sentence structure.

I’ve posted links to other online texts here , here, here, and here.

Some more MOE materials

The Ministry of Education has made available for download over a hundred contemporary essays in Taiwanese.  They are, unfortunately, all in Chinese characters instead of POJ, but the MP3 files for each work are also available at the bottom of each section (look for 朗讀稿聲音檔), which is a nice feature.

Online MOE Dictionary, part 2

I’ve had a chance to take a longer look at the Ministry of Education’s new Taiwanese dictionary. If you can read Mandarin well, you’ll find, in addition to the dictionary itself, lots of other good material on the site, including:

–A dictionary of proverbs (sample here)

–Pronunciation for hundreds of family names (sample here)

–Taiwan place names (including old names, MRT stations, rivers and streams, mountain peaks and ranges, and railroad stations)

–Family relations (this might be my favorite)

–Foreign loanwords

–Regional differences in pronunciation and vocabulary

–Body parts (sample here)

–Traditional seasonal terms

Happy New Year

Góa chiok lí kap lín chôan ke Sin-nî khòai-lo̍k!

Bān sū jû ì!

New Online MOE Dictionary

The Ministry of Education now has a beta version of a Taiwanese dictionary on its webpage.  I haven’t had a chance to look too closely at it, but it seems comprehensive, and includes Mandarin explanations and example sentences for most words. One nice feature of the dictionary is that even though it uses the official Tai-lo romanization sytem, you can use POJ to search as well.

Good online Taiwanese materials

I just read about this in today’s Lienho Pao.  The Taipei City government has created an online text for elementary school students to study everyday Taiwanese (and two kinds of Hakka!):

http://www.digimagic.com.tw/lang2009/ 

If you speak and read basic Mandarin, it looks to be a very useful introductory text.  It even has little interactive games.

Busy at work and home…

…so there won’t be anything until after the holidays.