Penang Hokkien lessons

[Ah-bin]

Ok, so this is a direct quote from the infallible Pope of Penang Hokkien himself.

For me, the only subject in English in school is English. The rest is in Bahasa Malaysia. Yet I think in English. I am training myself to get used to thinking in Penang Hokkien now, and am able to do translations from English to Penang Hokkien increasingly smoothly. Having said that, some may say that my Penang Hokkien follows an English syntext. I have no problem with that. To them, I will point out that Penang Hokkien is a creolized language, and each person can bring to the language his own input, and the result is still Penang Hokkien.

(August 2 2014)

If you want to see how far that attitude gets you, here is some reading material:

http://www.penang-traveltips.com/hokkien/funeral.htm

That would be hilariously funny if it were not being seriously presented as an example of good Penang Hokkien for learner.

[Ah-bin]

This time I let him speak for himself. I hope no-one dies in the stampede to learn free TJ.

LIMITED TIME OFFER TO PENANG HOKKIEN TEACHERS
For a limited time only, I will teach my system for writing Penang Hokkien to teachers of Penang Hokkien in Penang for free.
People who are teaching Penang Hokkien should learn the system and ensure their pupils are familiar with it. Anybody learning Penang Hokkien will eventually come across my writing system, online and offline, and they will want to be able to read it. It is therefore a disservice to learners of Penang Hokkien if their teachers are not familiar with the system, ignores the system, and when asked about the system, they misrepresent it.
Of course I can't force people to learn the writing system, but I can provide incentives. And for now, the incentive is, I will teach them for free until they are familiar with the system and can use my dictionary to look up words. And any Penang Hokkien teacher who declines to be taught now will not be taught for free in future.
Teachers who learn the system are free to create their own learning material in the system. In other words, they get free knowledge which they can use to make money. They are also allowed to publish books in Penang Hokkien using this system. However, they must observe two conditions:
a) I am identified as the creator. They can the system the TJ System, Tye System or Tye Ji. They cannot give it a name of their own choosing that does not identify me as the creator.
b) Penang Hokkien teachers are not allowed to modify my system on their own. They can certainly provide me inputs for further refinement, and if their suggestions are accepted, I will communicate the amendments to all teachers of Penang Hokkien using my system.
If you know of anybody teaching Penang Hokkien, please ask him or her to get in touch with me, so that I can get him up to speed on the system.

[amhoanna]

Ah-bin, lú ê WIT sī SHARP AS EVER.

[timothytye]

Wah, Pope of Penang Hokkien! Thank you, thank you for the undeserving honor, but I won't reciprocate. I am not in the habit of calling people names, even if they call me plenty.

I do acknowledge that there were (and still are) typos in some of the spellings and I am working to fix them, refine them, improve on them. I am thankful for the support that I continue to receive from many, many people. I am a gentleman. And despite everything you have said, I would appreciate help from you too. But if you are only eager to condemn, dismiss and condescend, I will proceed without your involvement. So, a person saving his own mother tongue is condemned as having an attitude. Then so be it.

History has shown that the new is often ridiculed and dismissed. The sad thing is that the people who have the knowledge to help chose instead to dismiss and condemn. A weaker character would have caved in to your condemnation. But a year on, and I'm still standing. And the last that I check, I have no plans to die any time soon. So unless you get used to what I do, I will remain a thorn in your flesh for a very long time to come.

[Ah-bin]

Chûi-chûi kóng ài lú sí? Che sī lú ka-kī sio·ⁿ chhut niā.

Lâng m̄-sī hiâm lú ài kiù Hok-kiàn, lâng sī bô suka lú tāi-iát niā.

[timothytye]

Mm33si33 wah4 cit3 lang2 tai33et1-eh2 nia33.

If you want to talk about being "tāi-iát", you should go look in the mirror before applying it on others. The problem is there's now an Eliza Doolittle who insists on saying lovely as loVERly, and is telling the stuck-up Professor Higgins to take his upper crust writing system and go shove it. And you don't like it one bit. How you wished I would fail, right?

If I were so "tāi-iát", there would be nobody in my Learn Penang Hokkien Facebook Group now.

When I demonstrate that I can use my writing system to write Penang Hokkien, and write very precisely too, you question my Penang Hokkien. In short, you are so negative towards it that if there's a fault to find, you would find it. Even when all I did is make a typo, or forget to add an "n" for a nasal sound, you would pick it up and condemn it. But I can demonstrate to you that even you make similar typos. Because we are human. Rather than condemn, you should learn to edify. If you don't understand why I do what I do, you ask, and you do it nicely; you don't straightaway dismiss it based on what you regard is the ONLY right.

It is a pleasure to have a whole forum thread dedicated to you. I'm not being "tāi-iát" here. I am just stating a fact. That a group of people will pay so much attention to you. I will screenshot it for the amusement of people. When they ask me, "Were there naysayers?" I will show it to them and say, "Of course there are, take a look at what they wrote." It is a case study of people who think positively and those who don't.

Go through this thread. Not everybody on it was negative. The opinion expressed at the start was incredibly positive. But once the trolls took over and began to push their opinion, the initial contributors stopped engaging. I also realized that it's not worth engaging with people who are not open to new horizons. And soon it's just the trolls going on and on, for months on end, a very small group of obnoxious know-it-all's talking to themselves and listening to themselves.

Someone said something at the beginning of this thread that aptly describes the bunch:



Until you have created your own orthography for your own mother tongue, and faced the attacks from people like you that I have faced, you have not gone through what I have gone through, so don't go about saying I am "tāi-iát".

[amhoanna]

What can I say? First, kudos to everyone for working on behalf of "the Hokkien language".

There is good, free information on Tye's website, just unfortunately filtered through an irregular and unreliable "system" of spellings, if it can be called that. Nothing personal, just that irregular "systems" of spelling are dicey enough at the best of times (see Thai, English, French), let alone for languages that are already practically not being used in written form.

As for:

History has shown that the new is often ridiculed and dismissed.

In this case, the idea that Hokkien, inc. Penang Hokkien, can be written using a regular, systematized Roman orthography of its own IS the [in practical terms] new idea which is often ridiculed and dismissed.

I think Tye himself has pointed out that his countrymen tend to find systematically Romanized Hokkien ridiculous or otherwise dismiss it, which is what led him to go back to the old idea of "writing Hokkien in English" in a non-systematic, idiosyncratic fashion. This kind of "Hokkien in English" is by definition unreadable and unsustainable. That is why there are so many Malaysian blogs that started out in Hokkien but turned into all-English-all-the-time blogs.

On some pages on Tye's site:

http://www.penang-traveltips.com/hokkie ... -water.htm

... sound is included! As a beginner, I would just listen to the Hokkien, read the English, and ignore the rest. Once U develop a good "sense" for Hokkien, or if U're a native or fluent speaker already, U can try to decipher the sentences. Not for the faint of heart. Satu Malaysia, as they say.

[Ah-bin]

Okay... point taken on the sound files, but I am going to keep going on to expose Timothy Tye because I think it's important for people to know shoddy teaching materials and steer clear from them.

First. the fact is that Timothy Tye (or is his name Eliza Doolittle now? Seems to suit) cannot speak Hokkien properly, and his "Hokkien" sentences largely consist of phrases that are translated word for word from English. His pronunciation is shonky and native speakers from Penang itself tell me it is no good, and some laugh out loud when they hear some of the silly sentences he comes out with. This is not a question of looking down on Penang Hokkien, or criticising "someone who is trying to preserve his mother tongue", it is simply calling out inaccurate and bad Penang Hokkien, and showing up the "expert" for the charlatan that he is. Some of the words in his dictionary are just pulled from Taiwanese or Amoy Dictionaries or just made up by himself.

Second. Timothy Tye cannot read Chinese and he has to go begging others for help all the time, because he can't even read the definitions provided in the online Taiwanese dictionaries he copies from. But he still dares to pose as an authority on Chinese characters in Hokkien. Now technology has got so good that even someone like that can pretend to know Chinese by cutting and pasting, but it doesn't stop lots of mistakes from creeping in.

Third. I would have been happy to help out, but there is no benefit in helping Timothy Tye for anyone else but Timothy Tye himself, he never gives any recognition to any contributions from others even when hundreds of words and many characters were supplied by other people. The whole thing is a scheme to give himself exposure as some kind of expert in a language he can barely construct a good sentence in. Note that every time you click on one of his pages, he gets money from advertising.

Fourth, I have yet to find anyone who is well-versed in Hokkien who doesn't think the spellings (you can't call it a system, because there is is nothing systematic about it) are a huge joke.

If anyone else finds him objectionable and doesn't want to contribute to the Timothy Tye retirement fund, you can just google search anything with "Penang Travel Tips" by title and then click on the little green arrow at the right hand side of the result to get the cached version. Or use a blank search to get the whole thing, and then copy it off for your own use.