mharrison.home on September 25, 2011
People in Taiwan will certainly find your Beijing accent funny but people in China immediately pick me as having lived/studied in Taiwan. That didn't happen years ago, so perhaps there is more exposure to Taiwanese Chinese now on the mainland. Tones are flatter in Taiwan Mandarin and there is different vocabulary for some things. 星期一 becomes 禮拜一 for example; 普通话 is 國語. Communists are 共匪 but that gets a laugh on either side of the straits these days. The Taiwanese are generous and friendly people, but make sure you get out of Taipei from time to time so as not to be too over-socialized into 泛藍 politics. There are the presidential and legislative yuan elections next January and these are worth seeing and hearing. Chinese is used for public political campaign in ways you never hear on the mainland.
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