Comments on Spoken Taiwanese

A while back I thought it might be useful to pick up some Fujianese. I looked hard for a book but had a hard time finding anything. I finally came across Spoken Taiwanese. Taiwanese is a variety of Fujianese so I figured the book would be helpful. This turned out to be wrong, at least when using the book by itself. First, it does not explain how to pronounce the romanized letters it uses. It also lacks a description of the tone marks, or for that matter the tones at all. Finally, it lacks any explanation of anything in the language. It is actually just a collection of vocabulary and sentences.

The book appears to be designed to accompany the book Spoken Amoy Hokkien, which appears to be a more serious language reference. I haven't seen this other book, and at $45 from Amazon am not quite ready to shell out the money for it or the $170 tapes. The introduction says that Spoken Amoy Hokkien was written in Malaya during wartime, and that it doesn't reflect current Taiwanese usage and that Spoken Taiwanese was meant to rectify that. That turns out to be all it does, so if you want to learn Taiwanese be ready to buy more books than Spoken Taiwanese.