J's Taiwan Mandarin Chiense Blog

Background:

Several things inspired the birth of this blog.
First of all:
The establishment of this blog is inspired by this article: "The role of prosody in the acquisition of grammatical morphemes:evidence from two Chinese languages" because in the abstract, it says "To address these issues, we compared the acquisition of grammatical morphemes in a pair of morphosyntactically similar but prosodically different languages, namely Taiwan Mandarin Chinese (TMC)..."

Second of all
My own experience of studying "Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language" at NYU. I felt very marginalized because all my "Chinese professors" are Chinese from China. They do not know much about the Chinese language and culture in Taiwan. When I hear the professor tells his students Chinese culture is so and so..., Chinese language is so and so... I often felt, "No, that's not true! That's not the Chinese culture and language that I know of" And then I realize that is because I am not from China.

When I substitute for Daisy, a Mandarin teacher at Henry Street School for International Studies, I told my students that I am from Taiwan, and therefore I write in Traditional Chinese characters, I use the pronunciation that is commonly used and considered "correct" in Taiwan (because sometimes the same character are pronounced differently in China). I tried my best to share my awareness of the similarity and differences. Yet a student still joked "we want to learn the real Chinese, not Taiwanese.

Third of All,
Today I happened to surf to this site :Junjie's Chinese blog and saw this entry of 40 most common radicals I thought that is good information and I should save it. The next thing I know, I am registering for this blog already.

So there you go, here's the blog. It's going to be about everything on learning and teaching Taiwan Mandarin Chinese, or as they call it "Hua-Yu" in Taiwan, and the Taiwan Chinese cultures and my experience in learning and teaching.