Difference between learning Mandarin Chinese and Taiwanese Hokkien for visiting Taiwan
If you're only going one week, just learn some Mandarin.

The advantages of learning Mandarin is that there are a lot of free resources, cheap and useful phrase books, and most people you will run into will understand Mandarin.

I've been studying Minnanhua (spoken in Fujian and pretty much mutually intelligible with Taiwanese) for about a year and I struggle with a couple of main obstacles:


The pronunciation is tough for English speakers. Lots of labial and glottal nonsense. I haven't counted the differences.
Pinyin is tough to figure out and there are two camps, there is a Xiamen University pinyin which favors consonants, and Peh-oe-ji, which was invented by missionaries in Taiwan.
There are more tones than Mandarin. Also some tones rules are not clearly expressed (some tones are based on pronunciation, for example if it ends in &lt;-n>; &lt;-m>, &lt;-ng> then the word is tone 1)
Native speakers won't let me practice, they will often switch to Mandarin.


Have a good trip.

Also you can check out:

Peh-oe-ji

Hokkien

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