Douglas' Dictionary with Chinese Characters?

[Ah-bin]

Wow..? This is overwhelming... Ah-Bin is not Chinese, and you are..? I always thought it was the other way round.. And to think I actually e-mailed him in Mandarin... Omg...

Haha! I thought everyone knew that I am 紅毛! I think i have been learning Mandarin for about the same length of time as you, perhaps a little longer (I started in January 1996) so no need to worry about writing to me in it.

Sim has basically hit the nail on the head. I started to learn Taiwanese when i lived there in 1997-8 but each time i went back and tried to speak to people I found that many people my age couldn't speak it. In Amoy it was the same, I was there last year and I did not here one child that could speak Hokkien. I heard a fair few in Penang though.

Another factor in me wanting to learn Penang Hokkien was when i discovered John Ong's Penang Hokkien podcast. Having a weekly radio show where people my own age talk about all kinds of things, that i can also download and listen to again and again, kept me going, as there was always something new to listen to every week.

Another very important factor is the help I get from the wonderful people here when i have no idea about a word. The only dictionary in which you can look up Penang Hokkien words from their sound is the one I am writing, so i often write my own questions here about grammar and vocabulary, and i get great detailed answers.

[SimL]

Hi Ah-bin,

I guess(ed) you were up late again tonight! I looked for you on unilang when you first started posting here, but you weren't on, and when I looked again about 2 hours later, I couldn't get on (same old bug).

Anyway, yes, I'd forgotten the other big plus of Penang Hokkien for you - the podcasts. Also, perhaps you should mention those Buddhist sermons too .

I'm off home now, as it's nearly 23:30 here...

Have a good weekend!

[Ah-bin]

One of the reasons I was not around was because I was having a sneaky sleep....I weont be done until Tuesday, but I wish you an enjoyable weekend as well!

Ah, yes. I actually wouldn't have got as far without the sermons by Bhante Dhammavudho. He speaks in very clear, slow Hokkien to get his point across and manages to express complicated ideas in fairly simple Hokkien.

At the beginning the breakneck speed of the Penang Hokkien podcasts was a bit too much for me, and I had to take a rest and listen to Bhante Dhammavudho instead. Eventually after a lot of listening, asking and talking I got to a point where I can understand the Penang Hokkien podcast from the first listen. There were always a few names and expressions that I didn't understand (like Pu-la-ti-kut = Pulau Tikus) and there still are. It comes from only having spent about fourteen days in Penang in total, and lacking the local knowledge.

I used to listen to Willy Wah's (he is one of the regulars on the PGHK podcast) podcast "Lonely Classroom" 寂寞教室 to learn Cantonese for the same reason, it is nice and clear and moves at a good speed. HK Cantonese podcasts were just too fast. Later I had to give this up to concentrate purely on Hokkien.

What I really wish is that there was a Malaysian Hainanese podcast, and a Malaysian Hakka podcast, or at least that I could get hold of someone to record sound files for the old Hainanese and Hakka textbooks that I have.

[amhoanna]

How do U say PODCAST in Hokkien?

[Ah-bin]

The Penang Hokkien Podcast just uses chiat-bok 節目. For any other type of film or programme they use hi 戲

Yeleixingfeng, I just remembered another reason why I kept going with Penang Hokkien. No-one ever tells me "you should speak Mandarin" when I speak to them in Hokkien, and I think it is because they have a better opinion of their own language than, say the people in Singapore or Amoy.

[amhoanna]

Sim has basically hit the nail on the head. I started to learn Taiwanese when i lived there in 1997-8 but each time i went back and tried to speak to people I found that many people my age couldn't speak it. In Amoy it was the same, I was there last year and I did not here one child that could speak Hokkien. I heard a fair few in Penang though.

No-one ever tells me "you should speak Mandarin" when I speak to them in Hokkien, and I think it is because they have a better opinion of their own language than, say the people in Singapore or Amoy.

I may've told this story here before, but not lately. Back in 2003, I "knew" a lot of Hoklo, but I wasn't used to expressing myself in Hoklo at speed, and I couldn't catch a lot of what people said, at least not on the fly. In TW everybody just switched to Mandarin on me. One person told me it was painful listening to me speak Hoklo. Someone else told me, "U don't speak Hoklo at all." U have to realize that in the TWese context, telling someone their Hoklo sucks can almost be a compliment, or rather a good-natured jab. Yet other people almost seemed to get angry that I would waste their time trying to speak Hoklo. And most of the people I knew well just didn't speak Hoklo in public on a daily basis. A taxi driver in Kelâng -- he looked Javanese but spoke Mandarin and Hoklo -- hinted that maybe I was hanging out with the wrong people, and he was probably right.

Then I went on a trip to Bangkok, Phi Phi, and Penang. On the bus from the Thai border to Georgetown, I
heard the driver and a passenger speaking this strange but strangely familiar language that had bits and pieces of Hoklo in it -- and what I would now (but not then) call a Teochew aura. Now I knew beforehand that half of Penang spoke Hokkien. I asked the passenger if they were speaking Hokkien. He gave me a weird look and said yeah. I spent two days on Penang. I saw people of all ages talking to each other in Hokkien. A 12-year-old kid working in a store walked up to me and asked, "Lú choē hámi̍h?", in Hokkien. A busload of 6-year-olds came up to the top of the Komtar Tower -- and they were all speaking Hokkien. Somebody asked me for directions in Cantonese, and they weren't at all surprised when I replied ... in Hokkien!

I took the bus around town... I went in a shop and they told me about the Snake Temple... I wasn't sure how to get to Ke̍klo̍ksī, so I stopped to ask these guys about my age -- in English -- and they switched to Hokkien on me. Actually they asked me, "Do U speak Chinese?" And I said, "Hokkiàn'oē?" And right away their eyes lit up and one guy started giving directions in Hokkien.

What I took away from Penang was a feeling that it was okay to speak Hoklo as non-native, with an accent, with mistakes... Communication is communication. And that confidence allowed me to improve quickly, so that when I got back to Tâipak, I went right back to imposing my Hoklo on people. Soon after, my one friend that didn't mind speaking Hoklo with me (back then) said, "U know something, U are really speaking Hoklo now."

And strangely enough on the same trip I also ran into a street vendor in Yaowarat (Bangkok) who spoke Hoklo. I just pointed at something and said, "Ce ài goācē?", expecting a reply in Teochew, but she actually said Pehca̍p kho͘ or Poehca̍p kho͘ in straight-up Hokkien.

I haven't been back to Penang, but I was in Phuket a few yrs later. It totally reminded me of Penang: the faces, buildings, streets, hills, and beaches. And almost everyone I asked told me their father or mother or grandparents spoke some Hokkien. (But I wasn't asking the Malays and obviously Tai-looking people.)

[SimL]

Hi amhoanna,

Thanks for sharing - it's a nice account which illustrates well the point that Hokkien is in a much better state in Penang than in Taiwan. It very much corroborates Ah-bin's experiences as well, for the situation in both Penang and Taiwan.

Let's hope that with the efforts of people like aokh1979 and "the other Sim" working to promote Hokkien (both in Penang and elsewhere in Malaysia), we'll see even more positive things in the coming years.

The introductory clips to the "Astro Hua Hee" (I note with dismay the absence of nasalization, and the horrible English vowel system in the second Hokkien syllable, but that aside...) imply that there might actually be a core of people - all over Malaysia - who would buy into a "Hokkien positive" approach. And the fact that even a Singapore politician is addressing people in Hokkien says something to me about the situation there. [Mind you, I'm aware that in that clip (also from reading about his background), he's probably trying to reach the most disenfranchised segment of the Singaporean population.]