Thursday, January 19, 2006

Help! I have to sing a Taiwanese song in front of about 1000 people on Sunday at my Company's annual banquet extravaganza! The fact that it's meant to be a comedy act isn't much comfort though because the only Taiwanese I know is 'Tee-abo' which means 'I don't understand'. Taiwanese is kind of like a dialect of Mandarin Chinese. So basically the characters are the same, but most of the words are pronounced differently. The little Mandarin I do know doesn't help me one bit. At the moment it's just learning 3 minutes of random sounds. I'm doomed!

7 comments:

RoG said...

Jaa, fun for them, not so fun for me!

Anonymous said...

sounds like fun...

FYI... taiwanese is not a dialect of mandarian. for the most part, you don;t just use the same cahracters for mandarian and for taiwanese.

★↖GRACE↗★ said...

you did a good job. proud of you!
:)

RoG said...

Thanks anonymous. I was always told otherwise. Very interesting! I'm curious though, the song lyrics were given to me in Mandarin Characters which a friend helped me translate into a sort of self made pin ying. So which words aren't written in the same characters?

RoG said...

Thanks, Grace :) It was only because of your help!

Anonymous said...

Taiwanese is one of the dialects of Chinese. Actually, it's one of the oldest "Han" language. Tell you more when we're back to office.

RoG said...

Thanks for the info. So which one is it? A dialect or not?