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I'm planning on visiting Taiwan as a tourist for about one week next year. Both Wikipedia and Wikivoyage say that Mandarin Chinese and Taiwanese Hokkien are common languages there.

What advantages and disadvantages do the two languages have? Is one language easier than the other for a lazy person who only wants to learn a few phrases? Are both of them tonal? How many sounds that don't exist in English are there in the two languages? Does Mandarin Chinese have more learning resources in English-speaking countries like Australia?

(In my case, I'm a native speaker of English, and speak enough Japanese to get around as a tourist in Japan and have a little bit of a conversation)

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    I suggest you learn Mandarin Chinese. Hokkien is a dialect, mainly used in Taiwan and Fujian Province -- as Hokkien is very different from Mandarin Chinese, most Chinese people don't understand it. But if you know Madarin, you can easily travel around whole China without language barrier. Furthermore, of course, learning resources of Mandarin are much more than Hokkien. BTW, you know Japanese, that's good, because many Taiwanese know Japanese too.
    – Stan
    Commented Jun 21, 2013 at 10:21
  • @hippietrail what does the tag "Taiwanese" mean?
    – Golden Cuy
    Commented Jan 27, 2014 at 5:56
  • @AndrewGrimm: Exactly. It's a poorly thought out tag that was here before I arrived. I started a meta topic about it but nobody joined in yet. In this case though I thought it must be intended to mean "The Taiwanese language" apart from Mandarin, which is more adequately called Hokkien. On it's own "Taiwanese" is just too ambiguous I think.
    – hippietrail
    Commented Jan 27, 2014 at 6:31
  • @hippietrail I think it means "something that related to Taiwan" as in American/British/etc.
    – Pete C.
    Commented Oct 3, 2014 at 22:13
  • It's not a "dialect", Stan. It's a language. In fact, it's much closer to classical Chinese than Mandarin is. Tang poetry more often rhymes in Taiwanese/Hokkien than in Mandarin.
    – Mark Wilbur
    Commented Nov 17 at 21:23

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If you're only going one week, just learn some Mandarin.

The advantages of learning Mandarin is that there are a lot of free resources, cheap and useful phrase books, and most people you will run into will understand Mandarin.

I've been studying Minnanhua (spoken in Fujian and pretty much mutually intelligible with Taiwanese) for about a year and I struggle with a couple of main obstacles:

  • The pronunciation is tough for English speakers. Lots of labial and glottal nonsense. I haven't counted the differences.
  • Pinyin is tough to figure out and there are two camps, there is a Xiamen University pinyin which favors consonants, and Peh-oe-ji, which was invented by missionaries in Taiwan.
  • There are more tones than Mandarin. Also some tones rules are not clearly expressed (some tones are based on pronunciation, for example if it ends in <-n>; <-m>, <-ng> then the word is tone 1)
  • Native speakers won't let me practice, they will often switch to Mandarin.

Have a good trip.

Also you can check out:

Peh-oe-ji

Hokkien

Learn Hokkien

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    +1 for useful information, and also being unbiased enough to not just advocate the dialect that you're currently learning.
    – Golden Cuy
    Commented Jun 23, 2013 at 2:29
  • Pe̍h-ōe-jī isn't common in Taiwan. They uesed Mandarin word to write Hokkien there.
    – Clay Hsu
    Commented Aug 28, 2022 at 6:46
  • It sounds like Fujian is quite a bit different! In my experience in Taiwan, natives used to switch from Mandarin to English when speaking with me until my accent was very good and I was able to comfortably handle a Mandarin-language workplace. With Taiwanese, people are often thrilled I can speak any at all and are very happy to help me practice or learn a phrase.
    – Mark Wilbur
    Commented Nov 17 at 21:26
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One advantage of Mandarin is that (due to the massive number of speakers) it will be useful beyond the one week that you will be in Taiwan.

Something else you might want to consider is learning a bit of both. With Hokkien being a dialect, progress you make with one may also extend to the other.

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    I would say that just because it's called a "dialect", it's unlikely to help you much, especially at the "several weeks" level. Cross-dialect transfer is much more prominent in highly formal vocabulary once you have a strong understanding of phonetic correspondences.
    – Stumpy Joe Pete
    Commented Jun 22, 2013 at 8:06
  • For a beginner, I would say that just the fact that some of the characters are shared (even though Hokkien has some of its own) will provide a lot of help with learning one once you already know some of the other.
    – James
    Commented Jun 22, 2013 at 8:13
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    If you're "weeks" into it, you're probably just going to learn high-frequency casual spoken stuff. And that tends to differ between the Chinese languages much more than formal stuff (which usually has the same characters, and at that point you'll probably understand the phonetic correspondences better).
    – Stumpy Joe Pete
    Commented Jun 22, 2013 at 8:24
  • It's a language, not a dialect. Taiwanese is more distant from Mandarin linguistically than English is from Portuguese.
    – Mark Wilbur
    Commented Nov 17 at 21:27
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For a week? I'm really interested in Chinese but I'd say don't even bother unless you plan on continuing after the trip. If you must, get yourself a phrasebook with tape or CD. There's got to be an app for that too. Have a good trip!

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  • Spoken Mandarin and Hokkien or Fujien are virtually two different languages. Both require more than a few weeks to be proficient at, even at the fundamental level. There are actually some variance in Hokkien as spoken by Hokkien people in Fujien province, Taiwan, Singapore and Penang, (Malaysia) owing to historical separation and local linguistic influences.
    – Wayne Cheah
    Commented Feb 17, 2020 at 6:02

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