[Apocryphon]

> It's much harder to use Taiwanese in Taiwan compared to High German in a Pennsylvanian Amish village.

Your example for difficult use is particularly apt in that you’re choosing to focus on specialized technical examples, which often default to international lingua franca anyway, often English.

I doubt that day to day use of Taigi in Taiwanese communities is as rare and difficult as you say. Maybe in highly educated and urbanized Taipei, but have you even been to the southern countryside?

[larryliu]

You can easily say these two sentences in Spanish that every Spanish speaker has no difficulty understanding.

El GPS en mi barrio tiene precisión cien veces peor debido a la interferencia de radio. mueve este MOSFET 15mm hacia arriba para balancia de estrés térmico a la placa.

I believe you can "invent" a Taiwanese sentence to mean the above, but there is no consensus among Taiwanese speakers in how to say them, so they would need your explanations of what your chosen words mean. If you borrow Chinese words, your sentence will be no much different from the Chinese sentence.

For your question -- yes you can scrape by with only Taiwanese, just like you can live in some areas in the US speaking only Spanish. But to do anything more, like riding a train to another Spanish speaking area, you could meet a conductor who have to open the translator app for you.

[mchaver]

For highly technical terms you can use the exact same strategy that Spanish and Mandarin speakers use, just use the English term like you did in your example sentence. A random Taiwanese speaker will not understand MOSFET, but neither will a Spanish speaker, unless they have that technical knowledge.

[AlchemistCamp]

Yes and even in most of northern Taiwan, there's a ton of Taiwanese everywhere. One of my old friends was born in Neihu and moved to the US around 3rd grade or so. When he visited me in Taipei as an adult, he spoke fluent Taiwanese and much more limited Mandarin. His situation was a bit comical to younger people, but not a real obstacle.

I also lived in the Guishan/Linkou area for a year and heard a lot more Taiwanese than Mandarin in day to day life.