____About Us __________________________

This is a course initiated and taught by undergraduates students in the University of California, Berkeley. Cal students who take this course will get 2 P/NP units. There are 3 levels: beginning, intermediate, and advanced; they are, respectively, designed for people with absolutely no experience, those with some exposure, as well as those with fluency.

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____Sponsors

Sponsoring Department
Asian Studies

Sponsoring Department Contact
Hilary Finchum-Sung

Sponsoring Professor
Hsiu-Hsia Hsu

____History

The Taiwanese Language Class began in the spring of 1994 as a course teaching introductory conversational Taiwanese. Ever since its introduction to the De-Cal curriculum here at the University of California at Berkeley, it has thrived as a very popular course. This is reflected by the increase in enrollment every semester and the expansion of the course from one to three class levels.

____Expectations

De-Cal classes are student-organized and student-taught. The same holds true for this class. De-Cal classes are also traditionally more laid-back and relaxed compared to the official courses taught at Berkeley. The instructors intend to make this course as fun and as enjoyable of an experience as possible. Since this is also a language course that can be taken for units (2), however, and the student instructors are devoting their valuable time to teaching and sharing their knowledge of Taiwanese; we, the instructors, ask students who want to take the course to be sincere in your interest in taking the course and to respect the instructors' efforts. The instructors give tremendous effort each semester in preparation for teaching the classes and we expect students to put forth a genuine effort to learn and practice the materials taught.

____Objective

All of the instructors are committed to making this class a true learning experience. It has been said that the best way to learn is to teach; and we, the instructors, see truth in that statement. Not only do we want to teach, we want to learn from all of you. Therefore, we encourage students to speak up and ask questions or share any insight you may have regarding the language and the culture. Hopefully, by encouraging more of an open-forum type of learning, where everyone gets an opportunity to share their knowledge, we can make this class a more enriching experience, while avoiding the less exciting lecture-based education found in a typical class. The language we refer to as Taiwanese has a long tradition dating back thousands of years. However, this long tradition has, for the most part, been oral. With a language that is passed down from generation to generation by way of mouth, there are myriad variations and nuances to the language and no definite standard set. Consequently, there may exist some phrases or words of which none of the instructors may be aware, yet they can be valid designations because your family or people from where you were raised use those words or phrases. It is both interesting and exciting to learn ways of different ways of saying things, and we hope to share that excitement with everyone.

____Course Descriptions

There are three levels currently available:

Beginning: The beginning class teaches a system of Taiwanese phonetics along with simple and practical vocabulary, stories, nursery rhymes, and much more.

Intermediate: The intermediate class teaches the system of Taiwanese phonetics as well as nursery rhymes, pop songs, old sayings, culture -- just to mention a few topics. The objective is to encourage and push for more student conversation and dialogue.

Advanced: The goal of this section is to have everyone participate in using, practicing, and refining their Taiwanese language skills. Those of you who took the intermediate class and would like to try conversational Taiwanese are certainly welcome. The whole purpose of this section is for people to speak Taiwanese, so even if your level is not up to par with the rest of the students, do not let that hold you back from at least giving the class a try!

____Phonetics

It has often been asked, "Why do we have to learn phonetics?" The truth is, teaching characters to those who cannot read Chinese would be virtually impossible to accomplish in one semester. For those who can read, there are many questions as to how certain characters should be pronounced, while many Taiwanese sounds simply do not have character representation as those found in Mandarin. Due to the fact that Taiwanese is an orally passed-down language, it would be easier to learn a system of phonetics that uses letters found in the English alphabet that serve as a pronunciation guide. In other words, you read the sound you want to say without having to translate or guess the proper pronunciation as may be the case with characters. For those who know ㄅㄆㄇㄈ , that is also not a viable option. There are sounds in Taiwanese which are not found in Mandarin, therefore ㄅㄆㄇㄈ is limited in the Taiwanese sounds it can cover. There is a system of ㄅㄆㄇㄈ that covers all the Taiwanese sounds, however, there are many new symbols and the usage of the symbols is vastly different, thus making teaching Taiwanese more difficult than learning the English-alphabet-based phonetics system. This English-alphabet-based system has become more-or-less standardized, and the texts we use, as well as many other books printed in Taiwan, also use this system of phonetics.

Audio samples are now available for download from our Taiwanese Language & Culture section. If you are a student and would like an audio or data CD of these files, please contact one of our instructors.