🇹🇼 The best Taiwanese Mandarin YouTube channels

A Taiwanese teacher whose channel is unusually strong on the things textbooks gloss over: tone pairs, tone changes in fast speech, mouth position for tricky sounds, and the difference between mainland and Taiwanese pronunciation. Explanations are in English with Chinese examples, so it works from day one. She speaks Taiwanese Mandarin, which is a feature if that's your target and a minor accent difference if it isn't.

TaiwanPlus is Taiwan's English-language public media service, and its Mandarin channel makes short lessons around real situations filmed in Taiwan, in traditional characters and with Taiwanese pronunciation and vocabulary rather than mainland forms. Free, professionally produced, and unusually good on the things that differ — 早餐店 breakfast-shop ordering, transport, the particles Taiwanese speakers use. Short videos, so it supplements a course rather than replacing one.

Miss Lin was born and raised in Taipei and her whole channel is about the Mandarin actually spoken there — the vocabulary that differs from mainland usage, the softened retroflex, the particles, and the culture behind them. Around 180 videos and 59k subscribers, free, with traditional characters on screen. Useful precisely where the big Chinese channels are least useful: they teach Beijing forms and mention Taiwan as a footnote.