I don't have many occasions ("liar, you have a Taiwanese girlfriend and a lot of Chinese friend!") to learn how to speak Mandarin, but I usually spend several hours per days to learn how to write, read, understand and combine (traditional only, simplified are just ugly) Chinese characters. Therefore, even if I merely talk, I can read/write/understand about 70% to 80% (depends on the material) of what I'm seeing.
To continuously improve that ability, I keep reading everything I can in the streets, in the buses and in the magazines. When I'm in Taiwan I usually read comics (like Dragon Ball or some other because the grammar/style is not too hard to understand) but in Hong Kong the Chinese characters used can be different:
- 對不起 (Dui Bu Qi) in Taiwan/China become 對唔住 (Doi M Jhu) in Hong Kong
- 謝謝 (Xie Xie) become 唔該 (m'Goi) etc...
Nevertheless, today I was trying to search some magazine that would use "standard" traditional Chinese with some interesting contents (Cars, Tech, Web...etc) when I simply found in a Abrdeen's (香港仔) 7-11 the Taiwanese version of FHM Magazine (男人幫)! It's funny to see that just like JP uses TW and HK to sell its stock (video games mainly), TW seems to sell its own to HK ! It's in my opinion a very smart move as Taiwan has a "young" and "cool" image among HK (and even mainlanders) youth.
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