 I never knew a language that I don't speak could feel so comforting to me. When I watched Tigertail on Netflix, and heard Taiwanese being spoken, I suddenly felt like my mom was hugging me. Taiwanese, aka Hokkien, is the language the adults used to use when they didn't want us kids to know what they were talking about. But also, just casually with each other. I never learned Taiwanese though, because outside of Taiwan, the global Chinese dialect used is Mandarin, so that's what I learned. And unlike how many European languages of the same family have some degree of mutual intelligibility, that is not true for Chinese dialects. So, this blog post is really more about the Taiwanese language, but Tigertail inspired me to learn some basic Taiwanese Hokkien, and for anyone curious, here's a little bit of cultural and language insights...
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