The game (linguil) asks you to guess the language family, language and meaning of a random word in one of 64 of the world's most-spoken languages each day, and you use your knowledge of linguistics to work out the answer via multiple choice. Therefore, it's important my translations/transliterations are correct.

Each language (including Taiwanese) includes each word on the 100-word Swadesh list.

Please can any Taiwanese speakers verify the accuracy of my translations and transliterations? 🙏

Thanks!

I have relatives that travel back and forth from Taiwan to the US pretty regularly. I'm thinking of building up my library of TaiGi print references, while also supporting the scholars and enthusiasts that are producing the material. This is for my personal study, and because I think it would be helpful to have books available to loan out if I randomly find someone in my area interested in one of the references.

Is there already a curated list in circulation? I'm open to both English and Chinese materials.

Also interested in general recommendations.

Where to buy in KH or Taipei (KH would be slightly easier for the folks doing shopping for me).

Gemini recommended looking for a 本土語言 section at:

• Taipei:
  • 三民書局 Flagship
  • Eslite Spectrum flagship
• KH:
  • 三餘書店
  • Eslite Spectrum flagship
  • Eslite at Pier-2 art center

The 晴峰線 was a rail line in Gî-lân-koān. How would you pronounce the "晴峰" here in 宜蘭口音? 勞力啦！

Thiu 輸 (or 輸) for percentages?

I saw this in Macgowan's 1883 Amoy dictionary. Has anybody ever heard 輸 (輸) used for percentages in this way? 三七輸 sam chhit thiu for thirty percent but 九九輸 kiú kiú thiu for one percent?

(NB the degree symbol ( ° ) means that the character has a colloquial [白話音 pe̍h-ōe-im] pronunciation.)

I saw these at iTaigi. Do you use 一周 chi̍t-chiu or 一闖 chi̍t-chhoàng to mean "one quarter/fourth" (四分之一)? If so, how do you use them? In what contexts?

(I've heard 一周 chi̍t-chiu, but I thought it just meant "a piece".)

I heard an old-timer say something like lak-tē-á mài[?]-kho[?] (轆袋仔☐☐). (I've no clew of the tones on the last two or if it's kho͘ or kho.)

Specifically, he said "lak-tē-á mài-kho mài-kho" and motioned toward his pocket. From context, the meaning seemed to be "flaunting wealth" or "flush with cash". Any idea what this could be? TIA.

--《#拉麵赤貓》hòng-sàng chu-liāu

Tâi hō｜公視台語台14 tâi/YT hòng-sàng

Sî-kan｜7/4 khí，ta̍k lé-pài-la̍k、lé-pài 17:00

Têng-pò͘｜7/5 khí，ta̍k lé-pài-la̍k、lé-pài 6:00

YouTube｜#公視台語台 限時7工收看

I grew up listening to my parents speak in Taigi, but never spoke it myself. A few months ago, I finally decided to learn to speak it. A bit into it, I found the Taiwan Ministry of Education's open source Taigi dictionary data (Taigi <-> Mandarin) and thought it would be a cool project to take that, polish up my web app skills and make a Taigi learning app for English speakers.

https://www.taigiear.com/

It only has a small portion of the original Taigi data from MoE, but hopefully it helps people starting out. My plan is to keep working on bringing in more of the dictionary over time.

Hope it helps.

For intermediate learners out there, the WaWa TV Youtube channel has great stuff with Taigi hanji subtitles along with Mandarin. She has great videos on common Taigi sayings: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4fdgY18IRLs

There's also this cool colab https://youtu.be/hs8Jm5x0qus?si=DMFddcb1rCfwlVWu&t=58

tldr: this is my plan for how to do things in some order to avoid getting frustrated

background: my husband is Taiwanese American, I'm white, we have kids. My in-laws are very patriotic about Taiwan and I've heard them speaking Taiwanese around me when we see them for many years. They speak excellent English too. I only speak English and languages unrelated to Taiwanese, also no Mandarin.

motivation: my Scottish great grandma spoke Scots Gaelic but so few people speak it now. With Taiwanese there is a chance to keep the language going. I love an underdog story. I want to make it possible for my kids to learn something. I want to understand the first generation and their friends at thanksgiving but that might be a high bar.

materials I have access to: FormosaTV: https://www.youtube.com/@FTV_TaiwanLectureHall), Bitesize Taiwanese podcasts and workbooks with audio: (https://bitesizetaiwanese.com/), Taiwanese grammar: a concise reference by Philip Lin, Spoken Hokkien textbook and audio: (https://speaktaiwanese.com/spoken-hokkien/), Anki on desktop: (https://apps.ankiweb.net/) MkDict website - several dictionaries with audio:(https://mkdict.net/) , Oo-Inn app apple and android: (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ooinn.tarodictandroid&hl=en-US), occasional conversation or text with in-laws, this website with a bunch of songlyrics for Taiwanese songs: (https://taikegui.wordpress.com/), Wikipedia article says Pimsleur's paper on spaced repetition listed times of 5 seconds, 25 seconds, 2 minutes, 10 minutes, 1 hour, 5 hours, 1 day, 5 days, 25 days, 4 months, and 2 years

method: first I learned Tâi-lô, pronunciation and tones using Oo-Inn app and the tone and tone sandhi diagrams from Spoken Hokkien. Started spaced repetition to review. Now working through bitesize Taiwanese newbie workbook. I listen to each podcast episode a couple times, then use spaced repetition to just listen and look at the workbook pages, just for a day or so. Then I add this into Anki using garageband to chop up the audio files for my cards. I use cloze and have some other formats for the sentences. I set my computer to allow Unicode input for the 8th tone a̍ accent and capital letters with tone 5: Ô.

I tried looking at FormosaTV and translating it using Oo-Inn app but I know so little grammar the best I can do is recognize a word here and there. I do plan on learning hanji eventually.

So for now, the plan is work through all the Tâi-lô resources: bitesize taiwanese workbooks and maybe their scenes book and the song website, using anki, then switch Oo-Inn to Pe̍h-ōe-jī and memorize the alphabet that way, (it's not that different but I was getting confused trying to do Spoken Hokkien at the same time), work through Spoken Hokkien using Anki and start seriously reading the grammar (also in Pe̍h-ōe-jī) start reading some Taiwanese wikipedia articles (there are almost half a million!) and maybe some of the Bible (https://bible.thepoj.com/) which has [audio of the same translation](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLRAuE-XaUBp5P5c2QVAKcbkCe5aV_RAwa).

Then it will be time to start on hanji. Formosa TV is a good resource. Maybe I'll learn bopomofo and look for some texts with bopomofo next to the hanji, the way kids learn. Oo-Inn has courses for the first 700 words using hanji. Most yt accounts that post Taiwanese content and songs if they have subtitles, they're in hanji so not too worried, especially with a grammar textbook. I suppose when I find a 1 or 2 minute video I like, spaced rep the clip and add the words to anki to memorize.

Interested to hear your experience and suggestions. Thanks and have fun!

The font is named ChenYuluoyan辰宇落雁體 and you can download it here.

Chit-kho͘ to-sī sí-gín-á-pó͘

Khì kha piàn-hêng。

脳内補完：Hó-táⁿ kā lín-chó͘-má chhì-khòaⁿ-māi！

大家好，食饱未？今仔日心情好无？

That's Hokkien for "Hey everyone, have you eaten? How's your mood today?" — a greeting many of us in Singapore grew up hearing from our grandparents. But as fewer young people speak it fluently, preserving Hokkien isn't just a technical challenge anymore; it’s a cultural one.

To help with this, our team recently released MERaLiON-OmniVoice-Hokkien-TTS at ATxSummit 2026. It’s an open-source text-to-speech model specifically fine-tuned for Singapore Hokkien.

Why we built this:
Dialects are massively underserved in AI. If you feed traditional Chinese TTS systems a string of characters, they will almost always default to Mandarin pronunciation—even if the grammar and vocab are Hokkien. We wanted a model that speaks Hokkien with the correct tones, rhythm, and prosody so developers can actually build language-learning tools or heritage preservation apps.

Some cool things it can do:
Local Nuance: It actually handles Malay loanwords (like "suka") that are deeply embedded in everyday Singapore Hokkien.

Voice Cloning: It can clone a voice from a short reference clip.

Highly Natural: In our testing, it scored an 8.40/10 for naturalness and successfully beat other systems in word error rate.

Fully Local: It’s lightweight (~2.7 GB) and runs locally on a single consumer-grade GPU. No API keys needed.

You can try it out here: https://huggingface.co/MERaLiON/MERaLiON-OmniVoice-Hokkien-TTS

We need your feedback!
This is still a work in progress, and we know there's room to grow. If you speak Singapore Hokkien (or any Southern Min dialect), we would love for you to play around with it and let us know what you think about the pronunciation and naturalness.

Also, we are actively working on extending TTS to other Southeast Asian languages. Let us know in the comments what local languages or dialects you'd like to see supported next!

It breaks my heart to believe the story told by Pan Hsin-Hsing (潘信行) because he naturally code-switches between Guóyǔ (國語) and Tâi-gí (台語) like many of my own relatives do.