Hi Pav,

Thanks for your message! We’re so glad to hear that you enjoyed the episode! We’re actually close to releasing a pronunciation “cheat sheet” that will help our listeners break down all the different sounds found within Taiwanese. We agree that just listening can only take you so far (especially as adult second-language learners), so our “cheat sheet” will provide english approximations, IPA, examples, and links to audio clips. We’re also exploring putting together a pronunciation guide in print with a more rigorous treatment, but this idea is still under development. For now, we hope our “cheat sheet” will be enough to get you started on practicing speaking. Be sure to sign up for our newsletter, so you’ll be notified when this comes out!

I believe it is much more useful to master the phonetics and understand which sounds correspond to which letters/combinations of letters in TLPA (or whatever system you prefer) before actually practicing speaking (even on the “newbie” level). Otherwise, if one doesn’t know e.g. that the Taiwanese “o” is not the English “o”, they may be tempted to substitute it with the English “o” when reviewing your notes from the Newbie series. Just mimicking native speakers is not enough, one should actually understand how to make each sound.

So I really hope you will make podcasts on the phonetics of Taiwanese. I’d like to learn Taiwanese, but I’m afraid learning how to speak without knowing the phonetics may be harmful in the long term because one may get used to the wrong pronunciation without realizing that their pronunciation is wrong.

Thank you for your work!