Any ideas if the average Hakka from Taiwan can understand Si-yen or Hoi-luk? If they do, I wouldn't mind mixing both, even if it'd result in a very unnatural and incoherent speech.
They seem to be able to understand each other okay, I think they might be quite used to hearing each other's dialect and that is why. I would just stick to one if I were you.
There is another book:
大家來學客話 by 彭德修 which was the first Hakka book I bought. He explains the differences between both dialects very well, and uses a POJ style romanisation that can be read out as either Hoiliuk or Siyen. It is written in characters one one page and romanisation on the facing page, but is hard to use if you can;t read Chinese at all. I should really have a go at translating it into English some day.
He also wrote a 客家話發音字典 which uses the same system but also gives the pronunciation in the Mandarin phonetic symbols for the two different dialects. Unfortunately there are no sound recordings for this.
BTW, is Meinong some kind of sub-dialect of Si-yen or are they at least close? I randomly chose 10 words from that textbook, and disregarding the tones, 9 of them were identical in both dialects. Perhaps my sample is biased, but since I couldn't find much about the dialect...
Yes, there is a slight tonal difference between Meinung and Northern Si-yen, the other Si-yen dialects in Taiwan use a rising tone 24 (like the tone written as ^ in Hokkien POJ) for the 陰平 tone (the "first tone") whereas Meinung uses a mid flat tone 33, more like the - in Hokkien POJ.
Some vocabulary items are different:
Nothern Si-yen says
"Ngai lau ngi" = I and you
Whereas Southern Si-yen (inc. Meinung) says
"Ngai thung ng"
Here are a few more: (I've been editing this trying to get the spacing right, finally gave up and did it with hyphens!)
Northern -----------------------Southern------------------------------------English
Nau-niet------------------------Niet-nau ------------------------------------busy, lively
chon-vuk -----------------------kui-vuk---------------------------------------go home
An-chu-se-----------------------To-chhia -----------------------thank you (Hoiliuk says "shin mung ngi")
pan-thiau -----------------------Mien-pha-pan ----------------------- rice noodles
Ngi --------------------------------------Ng ----------------------------------you
I have just remembered another book with characters and tongyong pinyin (same as used in Little Prince) which has jokes and stories in both Hoiliuk and Si-yen, called "客家笑料"
The French book is called
Conversations chinoises : prises sur le vif avec notes grammaticales. Langage Hac-Ka,
by Charles Rey
There is also a Hakka-French dictionary which I last saw for sale at 台灣e店 in 2006, and also at the publisher's shop 南天書局 (SMC Publishing) just around the corner. Note that French sources will spell it as Hac-ka rather than Hakka. This should help you find some more materials.
