Taiwanese Hokkien Vocabulary

What is Taiwanese Hokkien?

Taiwanese or Taiwanese Hokkien is a language commonly spoken in Taiwan and other Chinese/Taiwanese communities around the world. Hokkien is often referred to by a number of different names which can be confusing for those not familiar with Chinese languages. Some of these include Hoklo, Southern Min, Fujianese, Minnan, Minnanhua and of course Taigi, the commonly used name for the language in Hokkien itself.

Written Taiwanese

How Taiwanese should be written is often a debate amongst Taiwanese speakers and learners. While Taiwan's Ministry of Education has more recently released a list of recommended Chinese characters for use with Taiwanese, most people are still unsure which characters to use. This means the same word is often written with different characters depending on who is writing. This confusion has always been a challenge with promoting and teaching Taiwanese and is one reason some people prefer to write Taiwanese with the Latin alphabet.

Taiwanese romanization

The most popular ways of written Taiwanese with letters (known as romanization or Lomaji) are POJ (Pe̍h-ōe-jī) and Tâi-lô. The former was created by missionaries in the 19th century and Tâi-lô was created by the Taiwanese government, based off POJ. There are other ways of writing Taiwanese, but these are the two most common. Since this site uses data from the MOE, Tâi-lô and the recommended characters from the government are used here.

Taiwanese Hokkien vs Taiwanese Mandarin

Although Taiwanese Hokkien is often referred to as simply a dialect, it is not mutually intelligible with Mandarin Chinese and Taiwanese Mandarin. A Taiwanese person who has not grown up speaking Taiwanese or not learnt Taiwanese will not be able to understand Taiwanese Hokkien just from Mandarin. Therefore it is often seen as more correct to refer to them as separate languages. While we have also included the Taiwanese Mandarin characters on this website, the focus here is for learning Taiwanese Hokkien. Luckily there are plenty of other resources for learning Mandarin online, whereas Taiwanese has much fewer resources.

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