characters used to express certain words and characters and they can be ambiguous in meaning. In 2007, Taiwan's Ministry of Education formulated and released a standard character set known as the Taiwanese Southern Min Recommended Characters to overcome these difficulties. These standard Chinese characters for writing Taiwanese Hokkien are now taught in schools in Taiwan. When writing Hokkien in Chinese characters, some writers create 'new' characters when they consider it impossible to use existing ones; this corresponds to similar practices in character usage in Cantonese, Vietnamese chữ nôm, Korean hanja and Japanese kanji. These are usually not encoded in Unicode (or the corresponding ISO/IEC 10646: Universal Character Set), thus creating problems in computer processing. The earliest Hokkien vernacular literature written in hàn-jī is Tân Saⁿ and Gō͘-niû in the Ming dynasty, and koa-á-chheh is also an important kind of hàn-jī vernacular literature in the history of the Hokkien language. Vocabulary The following table lists a few examples displaying differences in vocabulary between Vernacular Chinese based on Mandarin, and Taiwanese Hokkien written in Chinese characters: In addition, Hokkien literature can consist of phrases that are vernacular to Hokkien, as well as literary terms originating from Classical Chinese. The following list of Taiwanese Hokkien words is adapted from a list by scholar Ong Iok-tek, contrasting vernacular terms with relevant literary terms; the English translations have been added by Mair. Literary and colloquial character readings Hokkien separates reading pronunciations () from spoken pronunciations () and explications () of Chinese characters (see Literary and colloquial readings of Chinese characters). The following examples in Pe̍h-oē-jī show differences in readings in Taiwanese Hokkien: See also Written Cantonese Vernacular Chinese Classical Chinese Taiwanese literature movement Comparison of Hokkien writing systems Amoy dialect Singaporean Hokkien Penang Hokkien References Chinese language Hokkien Languages of Taiwan Languages of Singapore