Pronunciation of 山 (in Taiwan) I'm a newbie Chinese student and I have a question about the pronunciation of the word shān (山), meaning mountain. When I went to Taiwan recently, friends there pronounced it as sān, not shān. For example, they referred to the National Park Alishan (阿里山) as Ali SAN. 

Is this particular to Taiwan, to my friends, or some other reason? 谢谢 for your help!
Still should be shan1 but probably they have some 翘舌音 problems, i.e. cant pronounce ch, sh, zh etc. A lot of Chinese variants don't have 翹舌音 so these pronunciations become problematic. 

Count it as an accent.