Interesting black and white Taiwanese movie

[SimL]

I found this on YouTube.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BSqNGH_K8oM

It appears to be a Taiwanese movie dating from 1958. It's nearly 1.5 hours long. There's a bit too much comedic action and music for my taste - I would have preferred more dialogue.

But still, I'm impressed that it exists (and presumably many others like it). I'm wondering what the social-political context of this film is? I mean, I had sort believed that when the Nationalist went to Taiwan, they vigourously went about suppressing Taiwanese language. Taiwanese of my own generation speak of being punished by their teachers, if they were heard speaking Taiwanese in school.

How does that fit in with the existence of this film? Perhaps the active suppression of Taiwanese only started in the mid-60's?

I don't know if amhoanna is still following this Forum. I hope so, because I'd love to have a bit more information on the background to this genre.

[SimL]

Hah! Found this on Wikipedia: http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/王哥柳哥遊台灣

Will slowly work my way through the article. My Mandarin is now good enough that this should only be 2-3 days work .

[Ah-bin]

I'm very pleased to hear that your knowledge of written Chinese has progressed to that level, Sim. No-one will be able to call you Ang-moh-sai any more! You'll also be able to read many more things about Hokkien and utilise about three times as many dictionaries.

I have to say, i started listening to this and can't understand much at all. I guess that means my Taiwanese is really terrible now!

[FutureSpy]

Thanks Sim. I finished seeing the movie yesterday, but as I said in another thread, I couldn't understand much of it Maybe that's a call for me to change my current study strategy. I remember when I was learning Japanese, outside classroom I'd never really study with textbooks. What I used to do was trying to translate songs by looking every unknown or unsure word in the dictionary, and constructions I wasn't familiar in a 文型字典 pattern dictionary. I also used to watch loads of anime and drama everyday, read and post in forums... And look at me with Hokkien. I still haven't learned enough from my textbooks, but I feel really afraid of get trapped forever into bookish situations and not being able to effectively learn it. I have songs, DVDs and Taiwanese people. It's time for an attitude change!

[amhoanna]

Perhaps the active suppression of Taiwanese only started in the mid-60's?

I don't know if amhoanna is still following this Forum.

Yes and yes.

At first the Party of Chiang was supportive of Hoklo media. They were against (1) bahasa Japan and (2) romanized Hoklo ... and (3) the bureaucracy was Mandarized overnight (I think), but they had no problems with spoken Hoklo media. To this day there is a decent minority of Hoklo Taiwanese born in the 40s and early 50s who speak broken Mandarin. They were probably schooled mostly in Mandarin at some pt, but they would've quit school at the age of 11 or 12, and thank the gods for that.

[amhoanna]

間諜將來 (FutureSpy, in Vietnamese ), what is a 文型字典?

I owe U a few dialogs still! I hope I'll be in time to be of service.

[amhoanna]

Just watched some. Interesting to see what 台北 looked like back in the day. The characters pretty much all spoke with a 台北 accent that is not heard so much on TV these days, nor in the mouths of young people.

[FutureSpy]

Just take your time, amhoanna! Just make sure to include stuff you think that would be interesting. Maybe Mandarin instead of English would work better with her. And if she doesn't know a word, I guess she can ask someone else and find out

It took me a while to figure out 將 was 将. Japanese uses the latter simplified one... haha BTW, I thought you had pattern dictionaries in Chinese too. Say you have the sentence:

今頃になって慌てても、彼らはもう帰っているかも。
(Even if you hurry up now, they probably already left.)

If you don't know the construction, you just extract the pattern 今頃になって〜も～ and look up in the pattern dictionary. I think that's the closest to a grammar you can have for Japanese...

[SimL]

Hi Amhoanna,

Great that you're still following the Forum.

Thanks for the additional information about the sociolinguistic background the Taiwanese film.

[niuc]

Sim, thanks for the link. I have only watched it for a while due to time constraint. Although I can understand it, it is indeed not the typical Taiwanese accent we hear today on media... interesting to hear 台北 accent (thanks to Amhoanna for the info).