Learning Plan

1.) First thing to do is to learn Zhuyin or Pinyin, or both. Personally I really like Zhuyin, but Pinyin is vastly more common in a lot of materials. The main thing you want to do here is learn the sounds the tones make and familiarise yourself with one or both of these phonetic/transliteration systems.

1.1.) (Optional) I would suggest learning Radicals here, as it can make things very easy going forwards. Radicals are generally how dictionaries are organised so it can help a lot in regards to dictionaries. They can also help with catagorising characters in your own study which might be helpful towards you memorising characters/vocab more efficiently. Now keep in mind characters are not made of radicals, and it's purely intended as a way to organise characters.

2.) The most important thing to do is to learn Vocab. Now how you go about this is really up to you - personally I would focus on Traditional Characters first, and then learn Simplified ones later on if you want to, as this transition seems to be much easier than the reversed. Anki is a program that is very commonly used by language learners. Here are a few decks tailored to Taiwanese Mandarin: TOCFL 2023, Mandarin (Taiwan's variant). Personally I am not a big fan of Anki, but I know a lot of people are. I am working on a vocab tool as an alternative, but this will not be ready for a while.

3.) Alongside vocab, you should learn Grammar rules and start looking at example sentences using the vocab you are learning.

4.) While doing all of this, it would be beneficial start to consume Taiwanese media - as training your ears on real spoken language is an important thing to do. Things may seem quite daunting and unintelligible at first but as you learn more vocab and grammar you will start to understand more.

5.) Once proficient enough at comprehending Taiwanese, both written and spoken, I would suggest seeking out language exchange partners to practice outputting.

Everyone learns differently, so if a tool listed here doesn’t work for you I'd suggest to try something else. Finding resources within the language learning community can be annoying as people tend to be dead set on their way being the best, but it’s important to stay open-minded. I encourage you to not give up if things aren’t clicking, instead explore various methods.

My main goal here with this site is to promote as many possible resources that are purely free or are at least somewhat easy to acquire at a relatively reasonable price point (mostly using the UK as a reference for these prices).