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It's the same language, useage is slightly different here and there, as is the accent. Chinese and Taiwanese people can understand each other no problem, with just the occasional misunderstanding (for example, 土豆 is potato in China, peanut in Taiwan). About as different from each other as Dutch Dutch and Belgian Dutch, or American English and British English. If you learn Chinese in one place, you can use it in the other place, with just some occasional confusion over which tone a word is. The bigger difference is of course in the script used: traditional Chinese in Taiwan, simplif

I think most learning materials for non-native learners would use Hanyu Pinyin, the same standard as mainland China. A minority might use Zhuyin, and a smaller minority (particularly of older materials) might use Tongyong Pinyin, a competing romanization standard that was used in Taiwan before it officially switched to Hanyu Pinyin. I wouldn't worry too much about it — even if you have to learn Zhuyin in addition to Pinyin, it's really not all that much extra work, especially when you compare it to learning thousands upon thousands of characters, each of which encodes significantly

I had been delaying taking the HSK4 for almost a year. I wanted to take the paper-based version, just to see if I could actually write the characters down... but it was taking too long. I like to keep my documents up-to-date just in case, and I'm too far from getting a 90%+ on HSK5, so I took the HSK4 earlier this month anyway.

I think it's very inefficient as a study method. You might learn something, but reading one page of a textbook a day would do much more. Watching shows in Mandarin is a good way of being a little bit productive in your free time, bonding with your target language, but it only becomes actually useful as a method for learning the language if you can understand most of what's being said.

Here's my almost-half-year update. 1) Have 150 hours worth of voice calls on HelloTalk. I've done 126.8 hours as of today. Logging hours and making this goal has motivated me to spend more time on this than I would've otherwise. Lesson learnt: log hours to track progress and keep motivated! 2) Learn 4 new words per day in Anki. I bumped it up to 5 and have stuck with it. One thing I learnt is that in the past I was too conservative with my Anki answers, i.e. tapping 'hard' when I should've tapped 'good'. By being more aggressive with my answers I can learn mor

@Demonic_Duck Yes, this is the main reason - peanut oil. Sorry for derailing the topic a bit, it just struck me as a really useful thing to know. Confusing potatoes and peanuts can be the difference between life and death. @mungouk Thanks for that. I don't mean to belittle the choices of a vegan/vegetarian or other food choices but it won't kill you to eat meat accidentally where as even the tiniest about of peanut can have serious consequences for a nut allergy sufferer. I just can't take the risk. I don't even eat out in the UK where I should be perfectly understood as some people sti

We're off-topic here but although I don't have food allergies, as a mostly-vegetarian I felt similarly apprehensive before I got here. (Having been regaled with stories by work colleagues about going on business trips and taken out to fancy restaurants where they'd been offered various "exotic" animals to eat.) I'm not really a fan of a lot of Chinese food but have ended up adapting some local dishes to make myself. Plus I eat a lot of Thai and Japanese food here, which I like much more. Anyway... don't let food worries put you off visiting! Especially in

This is mostly my experience as well. I think my textbook (2004-2005) had both Hanyu Pinyin and Zhuyin Fuhao. I don't think I've ever seen a textbook that used Tongyong Pinyin, although it probably exists. Many street names, place names and personal names use botched Wade-Giles. Not actual Wade-Giles, but Wade-Giles with the diacritics removed, so there is no telling if the ching you see is qing or jing, or if a chu is zhu, chu, qu or ju. Not a problem for the locals, because they just read the Chinese. Postal also exists (it's the same romanisation system that brought

Wow, thats scary as a person with a severe peanut allergy. This is actually one reason I never made it to China, fear of eating anything

I've been completely focused on listening skills for a little while now (and plan to be for the whole Summer, at least), and I'm slowly getting a better idea of the things I like to listen to. I am sure, however, that my tastes will continue to get refined as I gain more experience. Sadly, I'm probably evaluating things more for their language learning value and less for their other qualities. The suggestions on this thread have been pretty good. 小叔TV will indeed continue to be one of my go-to channels. I've also recently discovered that he has an alternate YouTube channel, called

Some Taiwanese podcasts specifically for Chinese learners (roughly ordered by difficulty): Inspire Mandarin https://inspiremandarin.com transcripts: no very beginner friendly Learn Taiwanese Mandarin https://lear-taiwanese-mandarin.webnode.tw/ transcripts: yes beginner friendly Talk Taiwanese Mandarin with Abby https://talktaiwanesemandarin.com/ transcripts: yes Mandarin with Miss Lin https://www.patreon.com/MandarinWithMissLin

btw an interesting tidbit for iOS/iPadOS users from this Monday's WWDC keynote talk... the mobile version of the Safari browser will support extensions when iOS 15 and iPadOS 15 come out in September. How that will work with "hovering" on a touch screen is another question, but it would be great to see mobile versions of things like ZhongWen.