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I'm unfamiliar with the variety of Mandarin spoken in Taiwan, so I was surprised to see a chilli-snack 香脆椒 referred to as 餅乾:

http://mall.tw100years.com/goods.php?id=9

真不敢相信這真是美味的餅乾!看起來是紅紅的辣椒,吃起來是香、脆外加點淡淡的鹹,不但能幫您排去宿便,還能養顏美容!

The definition of 餅乾 that I'm familiar with is biscuit or cracker, a baked pastry food. This snack doesn't fit that definition; it is made of fried chilli peppers:

enter image description here

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    I made some changes to your question, specifically on the use of 'Taiwanese' as a language. Taiwanese usually refers to the variety of Hokkien as spoken in Taiwan, whereas here you are actually talking about Chinese Mandarin as used in Taiwan, which is quite different. This WP page might help you: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiwanese_Hokkien Dec 11, 2013 at 21:46

2 Answers 2

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I am Taiwanese, and I have even had this "餅乾" once.

Generally, we can refer to almost every snack that is made with flour and "cracks" in your mouth as 餅乾. So when you say you want some 餅乾, people will not only give you crackers, but also cookies, potato chips, wafer cookies, wafer rolls, mille feuille, etc. These things have their own specific names, of course!

Even these are 餅乾: Jagabee Fries, and Pocky.

I would also like to clarify that this sentence is not in Taiwanese. It is in Standard Chinese, but we have our own accent and wording. Just like the differences between American English and British English. We normally speak two languages in everyday life, i.e. Chinese and Taiwanese, a Min dialect.

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  • I would also be surprised that the snack in the picture is called 「餅乾」 but it's acceptable. I'm Chinese, not Taiwanese. I never refer to potato chips or Pocky by 「餅乾」. Maybe that's just an example of different usages in Chinese mandarin and Taiwanese mandarin.
    – hrzhu
    Dec 21, 2013 at 3:05
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As 饼干 is generally used for things that we would describe as cookies in English, what he have here seems to be cookies wrapped in peppers, so spicy cookies. From the description: 它是辣椒,也是饼干. Also one of their primary ingredients is sugar. So it seems safe to say that they are an unusual kind of cookie, and that we are not dealing with a deviant usage of 饼干.

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