u/No-Dig-7526

I've been working on a project where I need to take differences between 普通話 and 國語·into consideration. If you learned from a mainland textbook and then moved to Taiwan (or the other way round), these are some of the words where the two standards actually disagree. I checked the Taiwan column against the Ministry of Education's dictionary (國語辭典, via 萌典); the mainland column is the 现代汉语词典 standard.

Word	Taiwan standard	Mainland standard	Meaning
星期	xīngqí	xīngqī	week
垃圾	lèsè	lājī	trash
研究	yánjiù	yánjiū	research
危險	wéixiǎn	wēixiǎn	dangerous
微笑	wéixiào	wēixiào	smile
擁抱	yǒngbào	yōngbào	hug
知識	zhīshì	zhīshi	knowledge
消息	xiāoxí	xiāoxi	news
攻擊	gōngjí	gōngjī	attack
突然	túrán	tūrán	suddenly
叔叔	shúshu	shūshu	uncle
品質	pǐnzhí	pǐnzhì	quality
暫時	zhànshí	zànshí	temporarily
廣播	guǎngbò	guǎngbō	broadcast
綜合	zònghé	zōnghé	comprehensive
可惜	kěxí	kěxī	what a pity
跌倒	diédǎo	diēdǎo	to fall down
侮辱	wǔrù	wǔrǔ	to insult
檔案	dǎng'àn	dàng'àn	file
夾克	jiákè	jiākè	jacket
痕跡	hénjī	hénjì	trace
企業	qìyè	qǐyè	enterprise

A few things I noticed putting this together:

• Most differences are tone only. The syllable is the same; the standards just picked a different tone.
• Many of these characters (擊, 突, 惜, 息, 叔, 跌, 夾, 識, 質, 跡) had the "entering tone" (入聲) in Middle Chinese. Mandarin lost that tone and scattered those characters across the four modern tones, and Taiwan and the mainland settled some of them differently.
• The mainland standard has more neutral tones (知識 zhīshi, 消息 xiāoxi), where Taiwan keeps the full tone.
• These are dictionary standards. Everyday speech is more mixed, so you'll hear variation. Either version is understood everywhere.
• If you're taking the TOCFL, its listening sections use the Taiwan readings; the HSK uses the mainland ones.

Which of these have you been "corrected" on?