Learning Taiwanese

I am proficient Mandarin speaker. I spent most of the 1990s in Taiwan, studied at the Taipei Language Institute, and had to use Mandarin in the course of my work and living my life there. Some people I am close with, including my in-laws and the drummer for my old band Feiwu (廢物樂隊), speak little English, so Mandarin is how we communicate.

Sometimes I get asked, "do you speak Taiwanese?" The answer is no. The Taiwanese/Southern Min dialect is widely spoken in Taiwan, especially outside of Taipei. However, Taiwanese sounds nothing like Mandarin and is difficult to learn. There are seven or eight tones, instead of Mandarin's four, and there are sounds which are difficult for Westerners to make.

But from time to time I have had opportunities to learn a word or phrase in Taiwanese. The story below is one humorous example.

It's 1995. Taipei. I'm living in an apartment at was then the quiet end of Hsinyi Road (信義路), but is now the center of the city (Taipei 101, which was briefly the world's tallest building, is only a few blocks away). Like every single one of my apartments during the first three years I lived there, it's number 4, 4th floor (四號四樓). In Mandarin, "four" is a homonym for the word for "death" (死) and is therefore considered unlucky by many Chinese people -- but not foreign renters like me.

Anyway, every day when I come home, I notice the neighbor's parrot, which is kept on the balcony, speaks a few words. Mostly it's cute Mandarin phrases (小朋友!, meaning "kid" or "little friend").

One day, inexplicably, I hear it speak a strange English food word. We don't have any contact with the neighbors or their bird, so I don't know how it learned that word. Maybe TV?

Nevertheless, it's remarkable. A local parrot has managed to learn another language! When my roommates (an American and a Taiwanese) return home, I say, "Hey, the parrot next door can speak English."

The Taiwanese roommate asks, "Really? What did it say?"

I reply, "A vegetable. 'Tomato'."

She starts cracking up. The American roommate starts laughing too. His Chinese is better than mine, and he knows a little Taiwanese. He tells me "That's not 'tomato', it's 'ta ma de', which is like 'motherf______' in Taiwanese."

Image: A parrot. Flickr/Bilal Kamoon. Creative commons license.