A flashcard app made for Taiwanese, and nothing else. 專門學台語的單字卡 App

I've lived in Taiwan for many years. People here have been kinder to me than I can ever repay: neighbours, market vendors, strangers who walked me three streets to find a bus stop. For a long time I wondered what someone like me could give back to this island.

The answer came from a sad pattern I kept seeing. Many Taiwanese friends my age, and plenty of kids, can no longer really speak the language of their 阿公 and 阿嬤. They understand a bit and can answer "hó", but a whole conversation in Taiwanese is out of reach. For them it's the language of family dinners and the old neighbourhood, and it's slowly slipping away.

So I started learning it myself. I booked a Taiwanese teacher and had class every week. Very quickly I found the real bottleneck: the teacher explained grammar and pronunciation well, but I didn't know enough words. You can't follow the auntie at the vegetable stall if half the nouns are unknown to you. What decides whether you understand is vocabulary, much more than grammar.

For Mandarin, Japanese or Korean the fix is easy: download a flashcard app, grab a shared deck, done. For Taiwanese I couldn't find anything that did the job properly. The big language apps don't teach it. General flashcard apps don't know what Tâi-lô is, and they can't pronounce tsia̍h-pn̄g. Text-to-speech voices mostly read the Hanzi in Mandarin, which is worse than nothing. As far as I could find, no spaced-repetition app was built for Taiwanese, with real Taiwanese audio.

I'm a software engineer, so I did the obvious thing and wrote one.

"Learning a language gets stuck on vocabulary. Once your word count takes off, you catch the key words the moment the auntie at the market speaks." 學語言最大的瓶頸通常是「單字量不夠」。

The routine that worked

My method was simple, and I still follow it. Once a week I have a class with my Taiwanese teacher. After class, every new word I met goes into the app as a card. Then every day, often on the MRT or while waiting for noodles, I spend a few minutes on whatever the app says is due. That's it. The app decides what to show me and when, and I trust it.

In about six months I went from understanding almost nothing to following most of an everyday conversation, roughly seventy to eighty percent. I can joke with the grandpas and grandmas at the roadside stalls now. Over ten months I've gone past a thousand everyday Taiwanese words. The classes gave me structure and the flashcards gave me the vocabulary. You need both.

Why I'm giving it away

Siksai Taigi is free, and it will stay free. There's no subscription, no ads, no account, no tracking. It's my small way of saying thank you to Taiwan, and of encouraging young Taiwanese to take back the language of their family. (The optional AI features work with your own AI key. More on that in chapter seven.)

It's also for people much further away. On my YouTube channel I get many comments from overseas Taiwanese in the United States, the UK and Japan. People who've lived abroad for decades tell me the thing they miss most is a sentence their grandmother used to say, and that their own children don't understand a word of it anymore. A language is a root. It connects you to your family and to a piece of land. Whether you're in London or New York, ten thousand kilometres from Tainan, you should be able to open your phone and start getting it back.

我在台灣住了很多年。這裡的人對我非常好：鄰居、菜市場的阿姨，還有願意陪我走三條街去找公車站的陌生人。我一直在想，像我這樣的人，可以怎麼回報這座島。

後來我發現一件讓我很難過的事。很多跟我同年紀的台灣朋友，還有很多小朋友，已經不太會講阿公阿嬤的話了。他們聽得懂一點，也會回一句「hó」，可是要用台語聊天就很難。對他們來說，台語是家裡吃飯時、老家巷子裡的語言，而它正在慢慢消失。

所以我自己開始學台語。我找了一位台語老師，每個禮拜上一次課。很快我就發現最大的問題：老師把文法和發音教得很好，可是我會的單字太少了。如果菜市場阿姨講的話，有一半的詞你都不認識，你就跟不上。能不能聽懂，關鍵是單字量，不是文法。

學華語、日文或韓文的時候很簡單：下載一個單字卡 App，找一副別人做好的卡片，就可以開始了。但是學台語，我找不到真正好用的工具。大型語言學習 App 沒有教台語。一般的單字卡 App 不認識臺羅，也不會唸 tsia̍h-pn̄g。很多電腦語音會用華語去唸漢字，這比沒有聲音還糟。就我找到的來說，網路上還沒有一個專門為台語設計、又有真正台語錄音的間隔重複（SRS）App。

我是軟體工程師，所以我就自己做了一個。

「學語言最大的瓶頸通常是『單字量不夠』。如果單字量衝上來，你在菜市場聽阿姨講話，就能立刻抓到關鍵字。」

對我有效的學習方法

我的方法很簡單，到現在還是這樣做。每個禮拜跟台語老師上一次課。下課後，把新學到的單字都做成卡片放進 App。然後每天花幾分鐘，常常是在捷運上或等麵的時候，複習 App 說「今天該複習」的卡片。就這樣。什麼時候該複習哪一張卡，由 App 決定，我只要相信它就好。

大約六個月，我從幾乎聽不懂，到可以聽懂七八成的日常對話。現在我可以在路邊跟阿公阿嬤聊天、開玩笑。十個月下來，我已經學了超過一千個常用的台語詞。上課給我方向，單字卡給我單字量，兩個都需要。

免費的原因

Siksai Taigi 是免費的，以後也會一直免費。沒有訂閱、沒有廣告、不用帳號，也不會追蹤你。這是我對台灣說一聲「多謝」的小小方式，也希望鼓勵年輕人，把家裡的語言學回來。（選用的 AI 功能要用你自己的 AI 金鑰，第七章會再說明。）

它也是給住在很遠的人。我的 YouTube 頻道常常收到住在美國、英國、日本的海外台灣人留言。有人在國外住了幾十年，說最想念的是小時候阿嬤常講的那一句台語，可是自己的小孩已經一句都聽不懂了。語言是根，把你和家人、和土地連在一起。就算你人在離台南一萬公里遠的倫敦或紐約，打開手機，也可以開始把它學回來。

Spaced repetition is the reason flashcards work. The trick is to space your reviews out, not to review more.

Every card in Siksai Taigi carries a small amount of memory about you: how many times in a row you've remembered it (its streak), how many days until you see it again (its interval), and how easy it is for you in particular (its ease factor). Each time you answer, those three numbers change, and the card goes back into the queue at the right distance. Cards you know drift further away. Cards you keep missing come back sooner. You only ever review what's due, so ten minutes a day goes a long way.

Four honest answers

When the card flips, you grade yourself with one of four buttons. They are thumbs, because deciding between "Hard" and "Good" at 7am on the MRT is a question nobody should have to answer:

單字卡有效的原因是「間隔重複」。重點不是複習得更多，而是把複習的時間拉開。

Siksai Taigi 的每一張卡片，都會記住一些關於你的事：你連續答對幾次（連續），還要幾天才會再出現（間隔），以及這張卡對你來說有多容易（輕鬆度，EF）。每次作答，這三個數字都會改變，卡片會被排到適當的時間再出現。你熟的卡片，會越來越久才出現；常常答錯的卡片，會更快回來。你只需要複習到期的卡片，所以每天十分鐘就很有用。

四個按鈕，誠實回答

翻開卡片後，用四個按鈕幫自己打分數。用大拇指，是因為早上七點在捷運上，沒有人想去分「困難」和「良好」差在哪裡：

The best deck is the one you make yourself, from the words you actually meet.

That's why the deck starts empty. Every card you make is a word you chose: something from your teacher, a sign you saw on the street, a thing your mother-in-law said at dinner. Making the card is already the first review. For a quick start, the app can load a small starter deck of 65 everyday words with the first steps you'll need:

最好的單字卡，是用你自己真正遇到的詞做出來的。

所以一開始，卡片是空的。你做的每一張卡，都是你自己選的詞：老師教的、路上看到的招牌、婆婆在飯桌上說的話。做卡片本身，就是第一次複習。如果想快點開始，App 也可以幫你加入一小組 65 個日常詞，都是剛開始最需要的：

For Mandarin speakers, each starter card also has the Mandarin word with pinyin or zhuyin, so you can see at once how 多謝 relates to 謝謝.

Making cards by hand

A card has two sides. Side A is your language, Side B is Taiwanese in Hanzi with its Tâi-lô. You can add your own recording, a mnemonic to help it stick, and tags like food, family or market to keep things organised. If the dictionary has a recording that matches your Hanzi and romanization, the card plays it automatically. You don't need to do anything.

Statistics you can read

The statistics screen avoids jargon and answers two questions: how many words do I really know, and how much time have I spent? A card counts as known once you've remembered it three times in a row. The screen also shows cards still being learned, new or missed cards, total hours of training, and every card flip you've ever made. Every week the app saves a snapshot so you can look back and see the curve go up. After a slow month, that's surprisingly motivating.

No account. No server. No tracking.

Siksai Taigi has no account to sign up for, no server where your cards live, and no analytics that watch how you use it. Your deck lives on your phone. Full export and import let you save a backup file whenever you want, move to a new phone, or share a deck with a classmate. You can export straight after each weekly snapshot, too. The only time anything leaves your device is when you choose to use an optional AI feature, and the app tells you exactly what will be sent before the first request.

對會講華語的人，每張入門卡片也有華語詞和注音（或拼音），一眼就能看出「多謝」和「謝謝」的關係。

自己做卡片

一張卡片有兩面。正面是你的語言，背面是台語漢字加上臺羅。你可以錄下自己的聲音、寫一個幫助記憶的提示，也可以加上「食物」、「家人」、「市場」這類標籤來整理。如果辭典裡有跟你的漢字和羅馬字相符的錄音，卡片會自動播放，你什麼都不用做。

看得懂的統計

統計畫面不用難懂的術語，只回答兩個問題：我真的會多少個詞？我花了多少時間？連續答對三次的卡片，就算「熟記」。畫面也會顯示還在學的卡片、新的或答錯的卡片、總共練了幾個小時，還有你翻過幾次卡片。App 每個禮拜會存一次快照，讓你回頭看自己進步的曲線。在比較懶的一個月之後，這其實很能激勵人。

不用帳號、沒有伺服器、不追蹤

Siksai Taigi 不需要註冊帳號，沒有伺服器存放你的卡片，也沒有分析工具在看你怎麼用。你的卡片就存在你的手機裡。完整的匯出和匯入功能，讓你隨時備份、換新手機，或把卡片分享給同學。每週快照之後，App 也會問你要不要順便匯出。只有在你選擇使用 AI 功能時，資料才會離開你的手機，而且第一次使用前，App 會清楚告訴你會傳送哪些內容。