A site teaching Hokkien

[SimL]

I was taught (by myself ) to say /iə/. I didn't realize for a long time that some "real Hoklo speakers" in Taiwan use /i/ and /e/. If they do, there's a good chance other elements of their patois will be different from what I learned too, so I'll be so hard put to understand them that I won't have time to make note of their /e/ or /i/.

amhoanna, I'd love to meet you one day and hear your Hokkien (or perhaps you could post a link to a wav-file or youtube-clip?). There are so few people in the world who speak Hokkien but didn't learn it natively, that I'm always interested in meeting such people (Ah-bin is our shining example here).

On my trip to Penang several years back, I was bowled over by the Penang /e/. Subjectively, it has a brash, extroverted feel. Someday I'll talk that way too.

I'm not sure how I feel about coming across as brash !

Conversely, I've always found the "-iə-" interesting. When I come across languages with a lot of "palatalization" (pj-, tj-, pj-, bj-, gj-), I am very much reminded of this other form of Hokkien. An example of this is New Norwegian "strekkje", "kyrkja", "ikkje", "sjølv", "sjø", "gjennom", "igjen" vs Danish "strække", "kirke", "ikke", "selv", "sø", "gennem", "igen" (= "stretch", "church", "not", "self", "sea", "through", "again"). So, for me, New Norwegian has this very "Amoy-ish" / "non-Penang Hokkien"-feel about it .

[SimL]

On the subject of hiEn-tioh / hεn-tioh: I recall reading a commentary in one of the Classical Chinese texts that 現 and 見 were interchangeable once upon a time, which therefore does not make your usage implausible.

Sigh. How sad is this (I mean MYSELF, of course, not you Mark!). Look what I found, just by co-incidence, when I glanced at the reply below the "Kalinga"-posting of August 2009:

Hien-tioh is another really interesting word. I haven;t found it in my other dictionaries with tioh on the end, but I'm guessing it is actually 现, which used to mean "appear" in older Chinese. I wonder if other varieties use this.

Hi Ah-bin,

This is great. I had always thought that "hien" was 見, because there are often "k-" and "h-" alternations, certainly between Mandarin and Hokkien, like 骨滑 "kut4", "kut8" in Hokkien, but "gu3", "hua2" in Mandarin (or between "kanji" and "hanzi" for that matter!). But now that you pointed it out, I checked the Etymology page, and 見 only has the pronunciations "kiN3", "kian3", so I was quite wrong. The same site gives 现 as "hian7", so your guess seems very reasonable.

SimL

This too was written in August 2009, further proving the point that I don't remember enough about what's already been said, and (sometimes!) just re-hash the same thing over and over again. MY BAD! This really argues for my doing my "Minnan Forum consolidation exercise".

[Ah-bin]

There are so few people in the world who speak Hokkien but didn't learn it natively, that I'm always interested in meeting such people (Ah-bin is our shining example here).

Hey, let's not forget Mark, he's gone much further than I have!

[Mark Yong]

While it is true that I am not a native Hokkien speaker, I think the greater credit should still be given to Ah-bin. I had the advantage of living in Penang for six (6) years of my working life, using the dialect regularly at work and in my social activities. Plus, I am now married to a native Hokkien speaker.

By contrast, Ah-bin has not had the advantage of long years of being immersed in a Hokkien-speaking (let alone Chinese-speaking) environment. And yet, here we have him, speaking and reading in Penang-style Hokkien, the latter being something that even most native Penang Hokkien speakers would be hard-pressed to match.

And let us not forget that his linguistic skills extend beyond the Hokkien ring-fence, and actually covers the greater part of the East Asian diaspora, and Classical Chinese.

[Ah-bin]

Ah...but then you did start with Mandarin at the same age as I did, and can read write and speak it, compared to my mainly passive knowledge...and I did live in Japan for two years and Taiwan and China for about three years combined.

As for the Hokkien, I think anyone who wants to improve their northern Malaysian style or Penang-style Hokkien (and who isn't going to marry a native speaker!) needs to listen to the podcast regularly, and also download lots of Bhante Dhammavudho's dharma talks. It is like overhearing conversations in Hokkien except that you can rewind and check things in a dictionary, or ask about them here. I know at least two Ang-mohs apart from me who want to do it.

At the Khoo Kongsi the person in the gift shop there told me about a Canadian woman who spoke fluent Penang Hokkien, and I am guessing it was Jean de Bernardi who wrote the book "Penang, rites of belonging in a Malaysian Chinese Community"

[amhoanna]

I heard myself speak Hoklo once, and it was horrible. No, mostly I just stutter a lot. Probably a psychological problem having to do with the "sociolinguistic dynamics" in Taiwan, but never mind all that.

On one trip to Hokkien, I had gtwo or three different people ask me if I was from Kwongtung / Kńgtang. As I walked away from one group of guys who were sitting around their oolong, I heard of them say, "I think there's people who talk like that in Kńgtang." Which fueled my Kńgtang fetish. B/c it seemed like Kńgtang (and its sidekicks, Kwongsai and Hainam) were just so big and so wild that U could find anything there. Anything. I've felt most comfortable speaking Hoklo in Kńgtang and M'sia, even in places where it's not a lingua franca. In Kńgtang, the nasty "switch to Mandarin" is least likely to occur

I just arrived in Siâmlô. On the plane, some Mandarin-speaking M'sian college kids were talking to a couple of Polish guys that spoke Mandarin. One guy spoke it perfectly. He knew every single nuance of the language, localized for Taiwan. It was amazing.

Speaking of making videos, though, I've had this idea to make a series of videos teaching Hoklo w/ one or more aLians at the heart of it. And this tangent is actually on topic. The core idea is that sex sells. Why not let sex sell Hoklo? I'm thinking along the lines of the betelnut girl.

[Ah-bin]

I was just typing in Hokkien Forum (mistyped as four-) and it led me to this site:

http://www.penang-traveltips.com/learn- ... nguage.htm

Nice to know that more people are doing things like this, even little sites like this are a good promotion of PGHK. Bit of a pity about the inconsistancy in the Âng-mô•-jī though, p’ui for pūiⁿ etc. But there are some very useful things in there for beginners.

I don't know if anyone has advertised this yet or not, but everyone should know it anyway! This is for advanced learners.....
庇能福建白話文 Vernacular of Penang Hokkien
http://www.facebook.com/#!/home.php?sk= ... p_activity

Don't know if the author of this wants his secret identity revealed....but we must all know who it is anyway! Thanks very much for the effort involved!

[SimL]

Wonderful to see such initiatives.

Kau1= to hang
Kau2= monkey
Kau3= enough
Kau4= dog

I was very heartened to see this. This is EXACTLY how I think of (Penang) Hokkien tones . This is because the Penang Hokkien contours more or less match the Mandarin ones (or our perception of the Mandarin ones, at any rate - it's slightly a vicious circles, as we then use our Penang Hokkien tone contours to pronounce Mandarin, making my initial statement a sort of "self-fulfilling prophecy"! Andrew has pointed out one essential difference).

In fact, if I write POJ, then I first say a Hokkien syllable in my head, then I see what I think is the Mandarin equivalent contour (i.e. one of the 4 above, which I can do easily, because I was taught to do this when first learning Mandarin), and then I do a very quick mental calculation: M1 -> H1, M2 -> H5, M3 -> H3/H7, M4 = H2. Then, to decide between H3/H7, I put that syllable in non-final position, and if it changes, I know it's H3, and if it doesn't, then I know it's H7. Finally, if it ends in a stop, if it sounds like M1 (but shorter, with stop), then it's H8, and if it sounds like M3 (but shorter, with stop), then it's H4. That's the mental calculation I do for every Hokkien syllable I write in POJ .

And yes, I agree, the spelling convention on his site is a bit sad. Personally, I wish that people who are not familiar with POJ or POJ-like systems would just say: "I'm using the vowels more or less like they are in Malay / Italian". That alone would already make things more straightforward, as the *English* convention for spelling vowels is probably one of the most unsatisfactory aspects of the English spelling system - more irregular and unclear one probably can't get (with the exception of the Chinese "phonetic component" of characters, then ).

[amhoanna]

Personally, I wish that people who are not familiar with POJ or POJ-like systems would just say: "I'm using the vowels more or less like they are in Malay / Italian". That alone would already make things more straightforward, as the *English* convention for spelling vowels is probably one of the most unsatisfactory aspects of the English spelling system - more irregular and unclear one probably can't get

I've noticed that M'sia Hokkien bloggers and forummers are a lot more readable than S'pore ones. More Malay and less English is what the doctor ordered.

But my guess is that Hokkien-based signage in public places is what "teaches" MY/SG people how to romanize Hokkien. This also creates some kind of a standard. It helps that some of this signage seems POJ-based.