Look words up, and learn them. The Ministry of Education's Taiwanese dictionary in full, plus a course through the 700 most common characters.
Taigi is an offline app for Taiwanese (台語), built on the Taiwan Ministry of Education's open dataset《臺灣台語常用詞辭典》. On the dictionary side, every entry comes with its Mandarin gloss and example translation, and with its audio, so you can look up and listen entirely offline. On the learning side, you start from listening drills for pronunciation and work through the 700 most common characters, one at a time.
WORKS ON IPHONE, IPAD, MAC, AND APPLE VISION PRO
All free to download and fully offline. A one-time upgrade unlocks on every device with the same Apple ID (Universal Purchase).
FREE, AND TWO ONE-TIME UPGRADES
Core search, browsing, bookmarks, and audio are free (camera lookup a few times a day). The pronunciation drills and lesson 1 of the character course are free as well.
• Pro: look up anywhere (select text in any other app and search, with audio), wildcard (pattern) search (* / ?), and unlimited camera lookup
• Study: everything in Pro, plus the full learning material
LEARN: FROM PRONUNCIATION TO 700 CHARACTERS
• Tai-lo basics (free): vowels, compound rimes, nasal and stop codas, nasalization, initials and tones, plus spelling and tone sandhi practice
• The 700 most common characters in 7 lessons. Lesson 1 is free; lessons 2 to 7 and Tai-lo dictation are unlocked by Study
• The app schedules your reviews and mixes reading, writing and listening. Just answer the questions and the words stay with you
• How much you do today is decided for you. There is no daily quota to configure
• Every sound is a real human recording, not synthesized speech
DICTIONARY: 29,606 ENTRIES
• Main entries, Taiwanese-Mandarin equivalents, single characters, appendices
• 23,298 senses and 17,906 example sentences, all shown in Hanji and Tai-lo Romanization
• Accent variations across 10 regional accents
• Alternate, contracted, and colloquial readings
• Cross-links between synonyms, antonyms, variant characters, dialect comparisons, and 文白 alternates
OFFLINE
Dictionary text and the category index are bundled with the app — search works offline the moment you install. Word and example audio downloads as packs, then plays offline.
SEARCH
• Hanji or Tai-lo input
• Tone-agnostic fuzzy match
• Single- or double-character queries supported
• Unified search across headwords, example sentences, and gloss text
• Wildcard (pattern) search (* / ?) — Pro
NAME READINGS
Type a name in Hanji and get its Taiwanese reading, character by character. Surnames and given names are handled separately and ordered as the MoE dictionary suggests, with literary and colloquial readings side by side.
SCAN WITH CAMERA (iPhone and iPad)
Point your camera at Taiwanese Hanji and the app segments the text using the dictionary, highlighting words you can look up. Tap one to search.
WIDGETS
• "Word of the Day" — a fresh Taiwanese word each day (free)
• "Bookmarks" — your saved words on rotation (Pro)
BROWSE
With the search field empty, you can work through the dictionary itself.
• By theme: the official MoE classification, 23 categories and 103 subcategories ("人事", "自然", "衣食住行", and more)
• Appendices: place names, station names, solar terms, loanwords, the hundred surnames, dialect comparisons, proverbs
• Kinship calculator: tap 父, 妹, 夫 like a calculator and get the term for that relative (姑丈), with the dictionary's own definition
FAVORITES & HISTORY
• Bookmark words you want to keep
• Auto-recorded view history (most recent 100)
TRILINGUAL UI
Available in 繁體中文 / 日本語 / English. Dictionary content (glosses, examples, Mandarin translations) is reproduced verbatim from the Ministry of Education source.
ABOUT THE DATA
This app reproduces the Ministry of Education's《臺灣台語常用詞辭典》(https://sutian.moe.edu.tw) under the CC BY-ND 3.0 Taiwan license, unmodified. Full attribution is provided in the app's "Credits" screen.
