Southern Hokkien: An Introduction is a research-based textbook originally designed for non-heritage learners who acquired a reasonably good proficiency level of Mandarin and wish to learn the Southern Hokkien language outside its natural linguistic environment.

It uses a situation-based approach in which dialogues are designed to reflect scenes in real life rather than classroom situation. Grammar and vocabulary explanations follow a primarily contrastive approach, focussing on similarities and differences between Mandarin and Southern Hokkien. Though mainly based on dialect variants spoken in Taiwan, Southern Hokkien also includes references to dialect variants spoken in other Hokkien speaking areas.

The textbook is complemented by a number of excursions and explanatory comments which help not only to follow required linguistic rules and cultural conventions but also to gain a basic understanding of the reasons behind some of these rules and conventions.