More goodness in the Scripts section of Tailingua. There are basic details on four more romanization schemes, plus a preliminary comparison chart for some of the better known systems. The picture on the right is of the extended range of Chu-im characters, including those designated specially for use with Taiwanese and Hakka. The last four characters at the bottom are for the Taiwanese stops, represented in most romanizations as “p”, “t”, “k” and “h”.

I’m currently working on ways to incorporate sound files smoothly in to pages, something which would allow me to build a useful phonics section. Also coming up in the next few weeks: more books and more detail in many of the existing areas of the site.

In response to some email I have received about the problems of rendering the romanization on the site properly, I have decided to use a version that requires no extra fonts to display correctly. I hope to develop an option for those computers with the capability to display fully-featured POJ, but for the meantime all visitors will see POJ with tone numbers instead of diacritics (accent marks).

I have updated a few pages throughout the site, but the main change is in the Bookshelf section, where I have added basic details on five more items - three textbooks for learning the language (one in German, but hey - when it comes to Taiwanese manuals, beggars can’t be choosers), one on linguistics and a series of POJ texts for children/beginners. I hope to add reviews of all the books mentioned on the site in the future.

The next task is tackling the romanizations section - details on four more systems and a conversion chart hopefully coming up this weekend. Feel free to let me know of any features or information you would like to see.

I’ve just about got the site ready to go, so please have a look. The idea is to bring together information in English about Taiwanese to form an introduction to the language, especially for people who cannot read written Chinese. I have lots more content to add, but I felt it was better to start with the content that is ready now, rather than wait for everything to be perfect (!) before putting it online.

If you have any suggestions for future development or criticism of what’s already there, please let me know - I’ll be happy to hear from you. Already planned is a phonics section, as well as expansions to the information and bookshelf sections, and more detail on scripts, including a conversion table. I’ll be adding this content as and when it’s fully ready, and will post here when something new goes up.