Hi friends!
Welcome to the first step of my language learning journey. I am embarking on this adventure for my Immersive Cultural Requirement (ICR) as required by my doctoral studies program. However, I am also largely motivated by personal passion and inquiry. I am a bi-racial and bi-lingual person with a white father and a Taiwanese immigrant mother. For most of my life, especially before my āmā 阿嬤 passed on when I was a child, the Taiwanese dialect has always been on the periphery. I am fortunate to have been taught Mandarin Chinese as a heritage speaker since I was a baby, but I often talk with my friends (bi-racial or not) who are typically children of immigrants and learn that learning the "mother tongue" is a process that is sometimes cloaked with complicated generational assimilation and nuance. I always thought I had access to my mom's culture and language because she taught me Mandarin; however, when I visited Taiwan for the first time in 2018 I realized that this was not necessarily the case.
My entire life I have heard Taiwanese, but I have never listened--and as a Hard of Hearing person that difference means a lot to me. I hope to start the listening process through this ICR project, which will probably take about a year or so, in hopes that I can learn more about myself, my family, and my culture through Taiwanese Hokkien. Since I am still a full-time student and I cannot formally take any Taiwanese classes here in Arizona or online (within manageable time zones) I will attempt to immerse myself in Taiwanese Hokkien, and by extension Taiwanese culture, by watching Taiwanese movies and Tdramas, listen to songs sung in Taiwanese, and learn directly from the Bite-Size Taiwanese podcast and workbooks. I will document and reflect on my progress here on this blog as I try to grapple with language learning and the emotional connection. I also might do some light research on Taiwanese Hokkien, the language preservation efforts, and the cultural significance for some more variation within this project. For multi-media blog posts (like songs and movies), I most likely will summarize the content, review the content a bit, reflect on the cultural connections, and then pinpoint a few new words/phrases I have learned from that piece. As a note of reference, this blog will also include some Mandarin Chinese (and maybe a little pin yin for folks who are not familiar) since it's a companion of Taiwanese Hokkien in most contexts.
平安
---朱自立
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