tui3 vs tu3

[FutureSpy]

Thanks for your detailed explanations.

Well, I guess I have no choice but mimicking people around me. Even recordings from my books seem to have few stops. It kinda disturbs me having that noted in romanization, but not hearing it at all. I remember having read a negative review about "Spoken Taiwanese" and another book from another editor saying recordings included so many stops it sounded unnatural. Thanks AndrewAndrew, I'll check later how S'poreans and M'sians do it and try to make it that way. After all, although I'm learning Taiwanese, it all started to me with Singaporean movies, so... :]

The old lady seems to accept better pronunciation differences. I guess it's because she's more used to talking to people from different places. Anyway, I was surprised to find the accent on my newly arrived "Spoken Hokkien" (by CETL, not to be confused with Spoken Languages "Spoken Amoy Hokkien") to match exactly that from the Taiwanese man from Tâi-lâm helping me (the author is also from there). I love the way they pronounce some /o/ as something in-between /œ/ and /ə/ =) I'm just a little confused with some words in the book, as there seem to be some annoying typos and some words noted with tone changes by mistake. And it being completely romanized is driving me crazy: trying to rewrite all lessons before I use it!

[amhoanna]

This is a new textbook, right? I Googled it and had a look at the Chapter 16 PDF. There are romaji typos all over the place! The book might be useful once U're confident U can suss out the typos, though.

[FutureSpy]

Yep, and very cheap too. 16.99GBP (~28USD), audio CD + postages worldwide included. What I liked the most is that it does provide some patterns I couldn't find on my other textbooks from Japan (well, nothing new actually, just synonyms). Anyway, I'll make sure to have these sentences checked by natives before effectively learning them. There's barely any grammar explanations, they simply give a pattern and add some additional example snetneces. In terms of comprehensiveness, not even close to "台湾語会話" and even less than Maryknoll...

[SimL]

The glottal stop is so clear in Malaysia that most M'sians/S'poreans follow the Malay convention of indicating it with a 'k'. The problem then becomes of explaining the difference between a glottal stop and a final 'k'.

My favourite minimal pair for this is 鴨 "ah4" (= "a duck") and 沃 "ak4" (= "to water (e.g. plants)"). Friends interested in Hokkien say that this is a very subtle distinction, but I don't have any problem producing or distinguishing them .

[SimL]

She does say 日本 lit8-pun2, but 入來 gip8-lai5 (as you said, it's a soft /g/), 今仔日 kin-a1-jit8 and 雖然 sui-jian5.

I hadn't been previously aware of variation between "j-" and "g-", but variation between "j-", "l-", and "d-" is quite common. In fact, there are some variants where it's almost impossible to tell if they are saying "l-" or "d-" (perhaps they are saying neither).

PS. I use glottal stops all the time. But they often disappear if they are at the end of the first syllable of a 2-syllable compound, e.g. "a(h)-kiaN" (= "duckling"), "a(h)-sai" (= "duck shit").

[FutureSpy]

I haven't met any Taiwanese for the last two weeks, since I've been a little busy with exams. Seems like the Taiwanese I mentioned earlier use /g/ sound more often than I thought. So 二 is gi7 and.. well, another word I can't remember right now.

And guess what, I've just got to my parents 2 hours ago and I had another Taiwanese textbook awaiting me (Okay, it might sound stupid, but I'm collecting Taiwanese textbooks now). Listening to the recordings, I was surprised to found out that besides l, d, g and j, seems like z is also possible in some words. At least of the speakers on the recordings clearly says a /z/ in 熱 (zoah8)... He pronounced it that way throughout the book. Need to check whether he does that with other words too.

[amhoanna]

Yes, but a lot of it is "conditioned" by the following vowel.

When a back vowel follows, there are really only three options, AFAIK:

l-
z-
dz-

When -i- follows, AFAIK, any one of the three sounds above might still be used, but:

"l-" speakers may use "d-" instead. This seems to be more true in the Phils, and less true in TW. According to Niuc, this is also how things work in Bagan Hokkien.

"z-" speakers may use "j-" instead -- the palatalized fricative, like or much like the Portuguese /j/. TWese speakers tend to palatalize their fricatives before -i-, strongly if they're young, but this seems to be less true in Sing-Ma. I never hear middle-aged or younger TWese speakers saying "si" unpalatalized, except maybe for dramatic effect.

"dz-" speakers may use "dj-" instead. Ditto. TWese speakers tend to palatalize their affricates before -i-...

And there are speakers who use "g-" when -i- follows. I think these would mostly be "z-" and "dz-" speakers...

It's not that complicated. Basically, there's just three camps: an l- camp, a j- camp, and a j-/g- camp. The l-/d- thing and the z- vs dz- thing are poorly documented most likely b/c the differences are so small...

[FutureSpy]

Wow... Thanks amhoanna. That's going to be really useful