...is that it's everywhere. I'll explain more below, but first, in honor of the recently departed Doggy, I decided to memorialize him with one more picture.
In this picture he is teaching me how to play "chinese chess." He always won though, because i couldn't read the characters on the pieces so I could never remember what each piece could do. He didn't have that problem. No joke, to finally learn how to play, i had to flip my pieces over and put color stickers on the bottom so i could remember that "red pieces can move....orange pieces can move..." and so on.
Chinese chess is played by seniors in the parks and in senior centers. I always thought that once i learn how to play and get some practice in, i can go and join them. But there is a problem...they don't speak Chinese.
While Mandarin Chinese is the official language of Taiwan, not everybody speaks it. Many people speak "Taiwanese" (or rather Hoklo, but most people just call it Taiwanese, but i hate this, because it's disrespectful to the other groups who inhabit Taiwan for just as long and longer than the Hoklo people). There is also Hakka, and aboriginal languages, as well as some very old people who speak Japanese (from when the Japanese controlled Taiwan during the first half of the 20th century).
All this can make it pretty difficult to practice my Chinese. A lot of times in the restaurants I eat at, and the parks i go to with my dog, the people around me are speaking taiwanese. even some vendors/neighbors/strangers i interact with on a daily basis, speak taiwanese. Granted there are plenty of people who speak Chinese, pretty much anybody 45 and below is fluent. However with so many other languages spoken here, true immersion chinese is hard to obtain.
It's not just with strangers outside, but also in media too. As a treat I sometimes watch movies to practice my listening, but most Taiwanese movies, switch naturally between Taiwanese and Chinese, given the situation. Granted this can be the same thing with movies from China which can be in chinese, cantonese, and shanghainese all in the same movie.
With so many different languages floating around in the air, it can be quite difficult to just speak and hear chinese. in fact it's so hard, that i'm giving up and going back to just learning chinese chess!
