ners, and etiquette in Taiwan
8/10/2013
TAIWAN EXPLORER
One of the things that I always found highly interesting since I moved to Taiwan is the way Taiwanese interact with each other. Communication, politeness, manners, and etiquette are so vastly different from what is common in my country that it took me quite a while to adapt to these new concepts. It's always very challenging to learn all the nuances of a new and so inherently different culture as an adult, because you're already heavily shaped by your own native culture. So to what extent can you really integrate the new values and norms with your own? That really depends from person to person, but for me it wasn't easy, because so many of them are in perfect contradiction with my own. During my early days I made a lot of mistakes, but I learned from them, and gradually improved. I hope that with this post I can offer a useful resource to future foreigners who will come to Taiwan.
Introduction
In this article I want to share everything I know about politeness, manners, and etiquette in Taiwan. Some of the examples and explanations will base on my personal experiences as a European living in Taipei, and therefore be subjective and Taipei-centric, but generally I will try to be as objective as possible, and provide some solid real-life examples. To really understand how Taiwanese tick I believe we first have to take a deep look into the the language, so I decided to provide a lot of useful examples in Mandarin, the most commonly spoken language here. Most of them have either been provided by my wife, or double checked by her. The focus was on the contemporary spoken language with real world examples. Of course there are other languages widely spoken in Taiwan such as Taiwanese, Hakka, and to some extent languages of Austronesian origin. Unfortunately I'm not familiar with them as much as with Mandarin, so I can't really say much about how politeness is expressed in them. There are also many regional differences in Taiwan, but as I mentioned before, I live in Taipei and this is a Taipei-centric post, so some things might be a little different in other parts of Taiwan, but not so much to be completely useless.