Special issues

 

The official language of Mainland China is standard Chinese, which is a basic form of Mandarin Chinese. Different Chinese cities and ethnic groups have their own dialects. Mandarin Chinese has been the official language of Taiwan since 1945.  Also, about 70 percent of their population speak Taiwanese, which means they use traditional characters in all written Chinese. 

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The most noticeable differences about pronunciation occur between what are called the retroflex initials (zh, ch, sh, r) versus their non-retroflex counterparts (z, c, and s). People in the Mainland China are very careful about their differences since it is a factor to test how standardized their spoken Chinese is. But in Taiwan, this difference is often ignored, for example the sh and s sounds are almost identical. For writing system, people in Mainland China usually use simplified Chinese while people in Taiwan are used to traditional Chinese. However, most Taiwanese people will be able to read simplified characters. 

 

A slight difference between spoken Chinese between Mainland China and Taiwan should be taken into consideration here. An anecdote from an article in the BBC shares how a Taiwanese professor was a little surprised when he was offered a “coffee companion,” which means “cream” in China. Or menus that offer sliced “tu dou,” which means potato in China, but peanut in Taiwan. These slight differences would certainly give a fluent speaker pause from time to time, but will not have a negative effect on casual conversation. The table 1 below shows a list of words that have different names or translations between China and Taiwan. 

 

In general, Taiwanese Mandarin sounds softer and more casual, this is like the difference between American English and British English. More specifically, Taiwanese use 啦 (la) and 啊 (a) while Chinese use 了 (le) at the end of a sentence. 

 

Example:

 

English: I am going to have dinner.

Chinese: 我要回家了。 Wo yao chi wan fan le. 

Taiwanese: 我要回家了啦。 Wo yao chi wan fan le la.

 

In Chinese we have a special character to describe this kind of cuteness, 嗲dia (3rd tone).

 

Another thing that makes Taiwanese pronunciation cuter is, for example, 叔叔 is shu (1st tone) shu in China but shu (3rd tone) shu (2nd tone) in Taiwan (so now Chinese sometimes write 蜀黍 shu (3rd tone) shu (2nd tone) to refer to 叔叔 in a cuter way). Similarly, 爸爸 is ba (4th tone) ba in China but ba (3rd tone) ba (2nd tone) in Taiwan, so people write 粑粑  ba (3rd tone) ba (2nd tone) to show cuteness.