i learnt hokkien in a week 

It's heartwarming that someone in the younger generation like yours take such great interest in Southern Chinese languages (yes, not dialects). It's getting increasingly rare for Gen Z to be able to speak proper Hokkien in Singapore. KL and Penang are heading that way with Cantonese and Penang Hokkien too. To me personally, I'm heartbroken that I'm becoming less understood in Cantonese in the city I was born, grew up in and thought I knew well, KL. You have restored my faith in your generation. Keep up the good work!

福建話、廣府話、客話佮其他 華南語言（Huâ-lâm gér-giân；『Southern Chinese languages』） 攏總 是 馬來西亞佮新加坡唐人 真重要的文化遺產，愛傳承落去，愛佮厝內人佮朋友做伙講華南語言。 Hokkien, Cantonese, Hakka and other Southern Chinese languages are the cultural heritage of Malaysian Chinese and Singaporean Chinese. We must keep on passing them down. We must keep on speaking Southern Chinese languages to our family and friends.

as a Singaporean from your generation that never had the opportunity to speak/learn Hokkien growing up, that last scene of your family karaokeing to that song in the car was kinda touching and inspiring :)

I'm a 19yo Vietnamese chinese in the US who speaks Vietnamese, Cantonese, and a little Hokkien + Teochew. a lot of my friends (international students from mainland china and Taiwan) shamed me for not being able to speak mandarin like the rest of them😭 it's so comforting to hear other ppl my age speak hokkien and other southern chinese dialects !!

When you spoke Hokkien, I was thinking "he sounds like a Cantonese dude trying to speak Hokkien", and my guess was right 🤣 Anyway, rock on!! It's aspiring to see someone trying to learn a dialect with not much online resources (compared to other official languages). I am now trying to do the reverse (Hokkien person trying to learn Cantonese)

Your mum said exactly the same thing my mum told me why she didn't speak Chinese to me and my brothers. This seemed to be the common idea at that time though now it's believed this is not true. Unfortunately in my case, it has basically destroyed the connection to Chinese culture in my family as my mum decided to only speak Indonesian and then English. I have learnt putonghua as an adult but regret that my putonghua will never be as good as it should be if I learnt it as a child. My younger brothers are bananas because of this. Even more regretful is that I did not learn how to speak my ancestral dialect of Hokkien. My advice to future or current parents, please do not ignore or give up your cultural language whatever it may be. Always remember your roots.

I'm a 35yo Malaysian chinese from Kuala Lumpur (KL) here who speaks Malay (national language), English (taught in school and use so much due to globalization), Mandarin (went to chinese school too due to complex local and geo-political reasons), Cantonese (maternal mother toungue, but also the current and disappearing lingua franca of local KL chinese, used to be Hakka, now going to be mandarin), Hokkien (paternal mother-tongue, also the weakest i have because of KL environment). What I'm gonna say might be late (or not!) but I hope you are still on the learning journey. I agree to your and your mother's views at the same time but there're some points I wanted to say. 1st, it's not your mother's fault you are picking a language slow when you are young. Everyone learns differently. Your mother has tried hard. Aunty, you did a great job! Your son has an analytical mind and acted like a linguistic scientist! He's going to be doing great! 2nd, as a malaysian chinese, like your mom said, we are gifted with a multiethnic and multilinguistic environment and everyone has the freedom to speak their own. I truly appreciate that. The environment creates a need to learn a language for survival. Like your mom asked you, why do you learn it? For fun? To propagate the language? Personally I think these are not good reasons. Especially when propagating culture and language shouldn't be taken too seriously on one's shoulder. You just need to speak more and think more in that language for your own good. This should be the way. Unless you are taking this as your career or lifetime mission. So, if you wanna improve your hokkien, I will just copy aunty's advice: speak and think more in hokkien! Find someone else to speak with, or even code switch to hokkien purposely if you can. You can find a lot of friends online to speak with, that's another way to try. 3rd, the way you learn from lyrics in songs is a bit limited. I guess you have already realized that hokkien or bamlamgu, generally has spoken and written structures. The way you learn from auntie is the spoken way. The way you learn from lyrics are most of the time the written form (which sounds poetic, and funny if you use it in daily conversations). Also, I can see you are a bit discouraged when auntie doesn't understand you and asked you to talk in mandarin. Don't worry about that, keep pestering auntie with that broken hokkien! You will improve over time! It's a natural mistake to transliterate mandarin to hokkien cuz both languages use the same writing system, which is very confusing. But you will improve in no time. One cool fact is that hokkien has evolved slowlier than other chinese languages due to geographical and historical reasons. You may be interested in those history. 4th, learning from dramas may be a good way for listening and shadowing the speaking. Don't stress too much on how it should be "pinyin"-ed, that only help you if your mind have a basic list of words that you already know how to pronounce. Pin-yin only makes a language relevant for learning more systematically, but imagine a baby learning how to speak, it's always shadowing. So, shadow your mother, or even repeating the same words when auntie speaks it. She will validate you. The same can be applied to other hokkien speakers. 5th, this is a fun fact but it may be funny too. Most hokkien/taiwanese/banlamgu speakers can understand each other at most 80-90% if not 99%. So, even if you don't speak the pure variant, don't worry, you might be the founder of new variant!!! May be it will sound funny ! Haha! Most importantly, you can converse and communicate. Frankly, in Malaysia, hokkien has many versions nationwide as language mutates over the spread of areas. And a little bit change of tone or vowel or consonant won't affect a lot. Sometimes, local hokkien also might loan or absorb or replace words with the local lingua franca. This is even more complicated in Malaysia, where chinese populations consists of Cantonese, Hakka, Hokkien, Teochew, Hailam, Hokchew, etc. So, just speak, dont be shy and don't worry about getting laughed or side-eyed. 6th, speaking of point 1 and 2, your mom may not have spoken to you since young, but if you have an heir, you can consider speaking hokkien to him or her. Even if it's a broken one. That's how language propagates, isn't it? It's your own choice and you will your own challenges though. Just like auntie had with the younger you. Sorry for the long text. I hope you the best in your hokkien learning journey! Ai pia chia eh eah! Gah you!

a 15 year old linguist enthusiast, hokkien is a beautiful language, especially as a chinese singaporean myself. thanks for the scientific explanations

Mom was spot on! Kudos for you wanting to learn a new beautiful language. Thanks for showcasing the Hokkien songs :)

And what you learned was Taigi, which is different from Quanzhou, Zhangzhou, Amoy and Peranakan Hokkien. Most Taiwanese would not be able to understand Peranakan Hokkien and vice versa.

Oh my god. I don’t know who you are, but I totally understand your struggle. My mom speaks Taigi (Taiwanese Hokkien)as first language, but she let me focusing on English and Mandarin (bc it’s the dominant language), now I trying to learn Taigi by myself in my twenties and getting judged a lot.

Great video! Very well edited, and high production quality. As a Singaporean, I only learned Mandarin, but always felt sad that I didn't pick up Hokkien or Cantonese. Thanks for making media that resonates with my life and identity! Hope you continue to make videos!

the ending was so cute. it was so nice hearing your mom talk her mind. i grew up in taiwan and have been trying to get my chinese back and she was great practice.

I am delighted that you decide to pick up Hokkien. Southern Chinese languages (for example Hokkien, Cantonese, Hakka, Teochew) worth to be preserved. Keep it up!

The 看啥潲 at 16:30 took me off guard. Good one. Congratulations and thanks for learning my mother tongue.

Both literary and colloquial readings are used extensively in everyday Hokkien. It’s not a clear cut distinction of one is exclusively used in conversation and the other only in academic or literary situations. For example, if you’re specifying a quantity of something, colloquial reading for numbers is used. But if you were reading out a phone number, or use certain compound words - literary reading is used. Another example, take the character 食 ‘to eat’. If used as a verb ‘to eat’, it’s pronounced as colloquial tsia̍h, but in the compound word 食物 ‘food’ you use the literary sı̍t-bu̍t. If familiar with the concept of onyomi and kunyomi in Japanese, this is essentially the same thing, except in Hokkien’s case both vocabulary registers are Sinitic in origin, just with one much older than the other.

This video is really cool. I’m born and raised in France and learning cantonese and mandarin, I have no link to hokkien but maybe one day I will be interest in it… Hokkien seems challenging to learn, different varieties seems a bit different and it’s hard because there are no standards in prononciation, romanization and characters. So you grew up in hk (english/canto/mandarin), and your ancestors are canto/hakka from a hokkien speaking town in malaysia, also learning mandarin in school… and now you are in sg to practice all these languages 🤯🤯🤯 Also the people watching the Johnny Harris video about chinese input methods, be careful the video is great but he made 2 major mistakes, check the comments people made corrections.

I just started studying Hokkien on Glossika and my goal is basic conversational skills within the next two years. You can imagine how shocked I was to see your one week title. Great vid!

You're absolutely insane for doing this! Thank you for a detailed description of the Chinese languages as well. a little note at 6:56, 魚仔's official lyrics is actually kind of a mandarin translation and didn't use the actual Hokkien words (“本字”）, so "想到半暝" is actually "想甲半暝" which is pronounced siūⁿ kah puàⁿ-mî; and “希望月光帶你回到我身邊” is "希望月光𤆬你轉來阮身邊 hi-bāng gue̍h-kng tshuā-lí tńg-lâi gún-sin-piⁿ" where 𤆬 tshuā means 'to lead' and 阮 gún is the first person possessive 'my'

this is so sweet. i'm hoping your journey is still continuing!

The edit, the filming and the theme as well as the concept are so freaking amazing I was shocked when I saw you have just few subscribers. You really deserve more view, keep going! 👏

The purpose of speak mandarin campaign in sg was not only to promote mandarin, it actually wipe out all the southern sinitic languages (so called dialects but they are not) I am from HongKong and my ancestors spoke Hakka and Hokkien, but both of my parents can not speak these two languages because everyone here speaks cantonese wherever you're from. However, I realize the teens (especially 00s) are giving up cantonese and prefer speaking mandarin currently, it's upset to witness the decline of our ancestors languages(cantonese hokkien hakka teochew), hope that we can preserve our own languages and pass them to the next generation.

the editing n pacing of the video's brilliant, i commend any love for languages and lingustics as always

Hokkien of the Tâigí(Tâioânōe, Taiwanese) - Lánlângōe(Philipine) - Hokkiànōe(Malaysia, Indonesia) - Bânlâmgí (Hokkienian) - TLHB language family.

Very impressive video! As a Cantonese speaker myself, its great to see other people preserve and learn other Chinese languages and make it entertaining, I want to learn some Hakka too at some point in the future

Mom looks kinda fierce/strict haha 🫣 I grew up in a family that speaks hokkien in KL, Malaysia. Watching your video & realising how difficult it is to learn hokkien, I'm so grateful & glad my parents decided to speak with us in hokkien growing up instead of English. Like your mom said, we learn Mandarin, English and Malay in school. Even though when I was in primary school, I had low confidence in speaking English and Malay (despite scoring well in exams), I drastically improved in high school when we were forced to speak only English or Malay in school. That helped a lot!

Hey thanks for this video it was really interesting!! We have a similar cultural background (I think - I grew up in HK, went to an international school, Mum is Chinese Malaysian who speaks Hokkien to her family). It's rare for me to find someone who can draw linguistic analogies in languages/dialects that I know. Loved the bits where you contrasted the mandarin/hokkien/cantonese lyrics!! (Also love Eggplantegg) Hope your Hokkien is going well!

As a 13 year old, I learnt Cantonese using TVB and Cantopop, just like what your mum said! I’m glad you’re doing it like me!

It took me 3 months to learn Hokkien during the pandemic. Such a beautiful language that deserves more attention to it.

EggPlantEgg is such a good band. I love their music.

dude this video is so well made youtube should boost this video wowwwww

I'm from the Philippines trying to learn Hokkien. Thanks for making this awesome video

That thing about different romanisation really hits my family. Some of my fathers generation are "tang" and others like my father and I are "tan". My grandfather is from Fuchow but around 1900 he moved to Sarawak, (West Malaysia) and although most of the fammily speak Fuchow - the Sarawak town they come from is known as "little Foochow" they mainly speak hokkien at home. "They" - because my father didn't teach my brother and I, although I lived in Sarawak for a year when I was about 14 and picked a little Hokkien.

Hey! And if you really want to learn Hokkien, you could go onto some websites that Taiwanese government has organized for learning Taiwanese. It’s like a dictionary of Taiwanese.

Thank you so much for this video. I loved it. I now have a new favorite band - EggPlantEgg.

Watched due to recommendation and stayed , about to subscribe, seeing a youth like you learning about heritage and making such well-made video is really great! As a fellow Malaysian, maybe next project you learn about Buddhist culture as a heritage to Southern Chinese, there are great Chan/Zen lineage among the Hokkien people

Yup, if I directly read Mandarin text "很" I read with Hokkien pronunciation "hún". Colloquially, I say "野" (iá) or 真 (tsin), for example, 野短 "iá-tér" or 真短 "tsin-tér". 漳州話 reads 短 as "té" and 永春話 reads "tér".

best alden video ive seen so far! keep it up! (I would actually watch content like this even if I didnt know you) next big thing is to upload once a week and you will rack in subs

speaking a language is the way to learn how to speak the language. Speaking another language and translate it is learning how to translate a language into another. When two people don't understand eachother it just needs time to find vocabulary that can be understood and work the way up from there.

Hokkien is spoken a lot here in Indonesia

The video itself was really interesting, but there's something about your presentation, style, tempo of the video especially in the beginning half, and just the general way you have done the video which is really amazing. This looks like a top tier RU-vid content. Good job! I think if you just keep creating good content, at some point you are bound to go on an exponential trajectory. You have charisma. It's really rare. Best of luck!

This is the first video of yours I watched. I've always been fascinated by languages and totally agree with what your mom says - when learning a language you also learn that people's culture and way of thinking. And I think that it goes the other way around too: if you understand the culture of the people that speak that language, then learning it becomes easier. I'll definitely watch the rest of your vids now. Please keep up the great work of learning Hokkien and do tell us how it goes!

Very very nice video.. Aunty’s daughter can speak English, Mandarin n very little Hokkien .. will send her this clip n hope that she can try to learn more Hokkien. Awesome clip! Well done

i hope that you do more videos liek this about hokkien or other languages; or if you can think of which oppportunities there are for connecting to these different languages that would be awesome. but this was great and you should feel proud! I'm gllad theres someone out there documenting their language learnign process this way! I'm inspired!!

Super interesting! 🤩 as someone leanring mandarin chinese, and struggling, I get it 🤗

巴生福建話 是 永春話。 Klang Hokkien is Éng-tshun Hokkien.

Good luck at your learning journey! I'm a japanese descendant from a family whose Japanese language was practically banned by my grandfather. So I am struggling just like you to learn my family dialect language from Japanese. But, yet, I'm still trying to learn Japanese first. I'm already older than you and I recognize the path is quite long. But I intend to keep on going this on. Good luck for us! And English is not my primary language too, so... sorry if I've made some mistakes in this message. 🙂

This is very interesting! I am a Teochew born and raised in Thailand. A lot of Thai-Chinese (Teohew, Cantonese, Hokkein, Hainanese, Hakka) gradually lost their language generation by generation. My parents partially understand Teochew but they can't speak. I can't understand it at all. I only know a few random words from my relatives.

庇能（Pī-néeng）福建話 主要是 漳州話，但是伊少部份的字會用泉州音。 Penang Hokkien accent is mainly Tsiang-tsiu (漳州) accent, but some words are pronounced in Tsuân-tsiu (泉州) accent.

Really amazing video :) Early days of a huge channel!

thank you so much for uploading this! your efforts gave me the push i needed to start reading up on my ancestral languages of cantonese and taiwanese hokkien.

Wise words from your mom. ❤

Very inspiring to see a Gen Z putting in so much effort to learn Hokkien. Actually in Sg the older generation Chinese still speak a lot of Hokkien, just go to a coffeeshop to absorb. Hokkien and Teochew are beautiful languages, underrated in Sg starting from Gen X who was influenced by the then booming HK media and think it cooler to learn and speak. Nowadays it’s Korean, again because of their rising media. Not that there’s anything fundamentally wrong with romanticizing a foreign language but one should at least try to gain an understanding of one’s ancestral languages. You have your heart in the right place, bravo 🎉

Applaud your content! Your determination on learning dialects. It's tough work, but I hope you don't give up!

Wow I dont understand why you have so little subs. You're editing is soooo good!

Amazing that you’ve taught yourself this much in such a short amount of time! Having a linguistic connection to your heritage is one of the most valuable gifts you can give yourself, your community, and future generations. You’re awesome ❤

As a British Born Chinese, I spoke mainly Cantonese as home as parents very much enforced as a Chinese person you must learn. My dad always prides himself that his passion to learn Mandarin was through listening to music (Teresa Teng). My mum's side of the family was very strong in keeping the Hakka amongst the aunties, but we were never taught that. Just gave me perspective, and also the desire to learn a little more about Hakka. The conversation with your mum was very touching actually, that she had to adapt in so many ways learning so many dialects.

7:00 "帶" supposed to be pronounced as "tuà" (Tâi-lô) / tòa (Pe̍h-ōe-jī), and colloquial Hokkien says "𤆬" (Tâi-lô: tshuā; Pe̍h-ōe-jī: chhōa).

Cool bruh! 🫡🫡🫡！I hope my son will be inspired by you to learn how to speak Teochew..I reckon from Cantonese speaking to learn how to speak Hokkien is challenging, but as they always says..learning a new language is always how curious and how they appeals to you..i speak communicable Italian, Turkish and Thai which I learn because of my interest of the countries..and the “environment” also gave you more opportunities to force yourself to speak them! GoGoGo!

I learned Spanish through watching movies..bt with subtitles. It really helps get better. I definitely recommend Immersive translate for generation of subtitles since not most movies contain them

You are Malaysian!! instant sub! love the video!!! great work can't wait to see your future works

dont usually comment but this video was fire and i cant believe ur channel is as small is it is if u really care for it then keep it up! this was awesome

Budding linguist & polyglot right here. I salute you. Add oil!

The song you played at the end is a very emotional Hokkien song. You did pretty well. Well done and speak more Hokkien.

Filipino-Chinese in Binondo,Manila in Las Islas Filipinas speaks Hokkien. Binondo is the oldest Chinatown in the world. Check it out dude!

Random ass commenter here hii 1. Pronunciation of Pe̍h-ōe-jī Cantonese just have a b and p sound (labial stops), and a j and ch sound (alveolar affricates), but Hokkien has 3, a b- , p- (sounds like a Cantonese or Mandarin b-), and ph- (sounds like a Cantonese or Mandarin p-), and similarly a j-, ch-, chh- (and a g-, k-, kh- for that matter). Last 2 consonants are what you may expect as your normal b and p, j and ch, g and k, but the first has you vibrate your throat before pronouncing it (I'm not an expert so I'm not going to attempt to try and teach you cuz I know I will teach you wrongly XD). See how the 'j' though the person doesn't stop vibrating their vocal cords, it just keeps on going. [You may also realise that the ōe has a lower pitch than jī even though they're the same tone, due to 'tone sandhi', or that the ōe changed tones because it's within a 'phrase' or 'utterance'.] 2. Glossika and Literary/Vernacular Fun fact: Hokkien has a lot of words with different literary/vernacular words and pronunciations, I think the most of all the Chinese languages. And my experience is that no one actually understands literary pronunciations if they speak but not write Hokkien (which is almost everyone). Stick with vernacular!! Also, I tend to use Wiktionary 😂😂 It lists both literary and vernacular and pronunciations in POJ and Taigi and IPA even (International Phonetic Alphabet which tells you exactly how to pronounce anything) and even lists dialects of Chinese lects which is super epic 3. 'six' I love how the proper way to pronounce the a in la'k is as if you're trying to cough up phlegm \s 4. Minnan/Hokkien [Minnan in Minnan is Bân-lâm-ōe to be pedantic] I've spoken to some Mainland Chinese people in my course and they would know 'Minnan' but not 'Hokkien' and '福建话' implies Foochowese instead of Hokkien lmao, while Malaysians and Singaporeans will probably never use 'Minnan' but instead call it 'Hokkien' 5. Malay in school Long ago in Malaysia if you don't pass Malay SPM (it's like the UK GCSE) you can't progress to the public sixth forms which is ass It's still like that in Brunei (man I was so happy I got a C) Also I think speaking Chinese dialects is discouraged in schools in Singapore and Malaysia 6. LIMBANG MENTIONED (random ass stretch of land splitting my country in half 😂😂). Most Bruneian Chinese are of Kinmen and Xiamen descent so I might expect your mom to speak that particular dialect or a Singapore/KL one (which has a lot of Malay loanwords)

this video was SO interesting and so well filmed and edited

YAAHHH love this content

As a 26yo Singaporean I grew up knowing English, Mandarin, Hokkien, Teochew, Fuzhou, Cantonese but it just means that over time, the skills for everything but english degrades with the lack of practice. Currently I am only able to manage english, mandarin and hokkien(listening only) Funnily enough, my hokkien became insanely good during NS as my encik only spoke that but after I ord-ed, I "forgot" how to speak it again. (Also alot of eggplantegg karaoke sessions during NS)

Love this video! Hokkien is my mother tongue, but its so obscure online. Glad to see it getting some limelight.

mainland mandarin : standardized 🐶 hk cantonese : spoken/colloquial + local vocab 💪 overseas hokkien : 🤯🧠🏋️‍♀️

4:45 she is teaching Teochew

first mistake is trying to learn hokkien through other chinese languages as an intermediary. you will not naturally learn hokkien if it has to be based on another language like mandarin or cantonese. that would be poison to your learning of hokkien. your mom did not understand what you're saying because you're substituting mandarin vocabs and trying to read them in hokkien when hokkien naturally uses different vocabs. it is much better, one learns a language directly without intermediaries. comparing them is just a matter of extra curiosity especially when you're already good at it. never compare them when you are not good at it yet, or else those other languages will interfere and affect your learning

Mandarin and Cantonese are actually closer to each other than either of them are to Hokkien, despite Hokkien being located in the middle. Hokkien and other Min Chinese dialects (Fuzhou, Putian, Henghua, Teochew, Hainanese) are the only modern branch of Chinese languages which diverged early on from Old Chinese while being influenced by Middle Chinese, whereas Cantonese and Mandarin are descended from Middle Chinese. This is also why Hokkien has many differences in pronunciation based on vernacular 白话音 or literary 文读音 reading. Literary reading tends to be pronunciations which are more derived from Middle Chinese influences whereas vernacular pronunciations mostly originate from the pronunciation which originated from Old Chinese and formed independently in Fujian. Furthermore in Hokkien there is an underlaying substratum of non-Sinitic origin from the indigenous Minyue people who lived there before the Chinese arrived and Sinicized the region, words like 'man' and 'woman' (ta-po, tsa-bo) has no Chinese character equivalent and words are often selected only based on sound with no actual meaning (查埔). Cantonese also has some words of non-Sinitic origin but the indigenous people of Guangdong and Fujian were different and so were their native languages which influenced their respective dialects. The region of Pearl River Delta was traditionally inhabited by Kra-Dai/Tai-Kadai people related to Zhuang, Thai and Lao people; and Guangdong was at times part of the same kingdom as northern Vietnam. Fujian on the other hand was the urheimat (homeland) of Austronesian people more closely related to Taiwanese aborigines, Pacific Islanders and other Maritime SE Asians. In the case of 畀 which means 'to give' in Cantonese it is probably originated from Kra-Dai (Tai-Kadai) languages, whereas Hokkien uses the original Old Chinese 予 which is even older than 给 Cantonese or Yue Chinese dialects appeared much later than Hokkien did and as a result they do actually still have a better correspondence with Mandarin when using Chinese characters; whereas in Hokkien you might find that many words don't even have a Chinese character equivalent simply because it's so old the original words have been forgotten and lost or that the words are not even of Chinese origin to begin with. Two features of Old Chinese only preserved in Min Chinese dialects (including Hokkien) and not in any other Chinese branch is 上古无唇齿音: consonants 'f' don't exist in Old Chinese and just corresponds to 'b','p' or 'h'/ 上古无舌上音: no consonants 'zh', 'ch', 'sh' or 'r' and they often correspond to 't', 'j' or other consonants.

as a Singaporean who was raised by a Hokkien grandma but lost command of the language after I moved out of her house when I was like 4, and as an ex-PGPR resident, this video really hits home. Like what you mentioned, the biggest challenge to learning Hokkien is the lack of standardized romanization. How do I know how to pronounce a word if it isn't romanized? At least with Mandarin, pin yin lets me know immediately how to pronounce an unknown character. Anyways, i've always wanted to improve my hokkien but its so tough in Singapore ngl, where the language is practically non-existent in TV or radio or movies. And basically no one under the age of 50 speaks it regularly :/

Looking forward to seeing your progress! This is really cool :D

Hokkien is dying. Please preserve this beautiful language. 福建话爱消失了，请汝毋爱放弃讲这个诚媠个语言。 Hok-kiàn-uā ài siau-sit liáu, tshiá lú m̄-ài hòng-khì tsit-le tsiânn súi e gú-giân. (Penang accent)

Good luck on your Hokkien learning journey! I want to learn Hokkien too because my maternal grandparents were from Xiamen and Quanzhou. I can definitely relate when it comes to the lack of resources out there!

Thanks, so fascinating! I'm living in Penang now and mostly get spoken to in Mandarin, maybe once in a while in Penang Hokkien. I do notice the younger people are mostly speaking Mandarin, parents speaking to their young kids in Mandarin. I feel like if I hung around uncles and aunties more, maybe I can pick up Penang Hokkien or at least order food correctly :D

What your mum said is correct. In Malaysia we are in an environmental where we speak different languages and dialects in our daily conversation, hence it is naturally becomes good. Once you stop speaking for a long period of time it will gradually forget. Like myself dad is hokkien mum is hainanese but at home we speak Cantonese and English. I learned hokkien from my nanny since a kid, but after few years when I went back to my family I seldom speak hokkien, occasionally will try to speak to brush up again😅 speaking to those who still use hokkien in their conversations

I was looking for resourses to help me learn Taiwanese (Hokkien) so I can speak it will my parents and grandparents more. (I know almost zero Taiwanese and absolute zero Mandarin). This video didn't help me learn anything (lol) but it did inspire me to keep trying. Thank you for this! Awesome video! And impressive that you were able to form tiny sentences from only learning for a week.

That feeling when you find out that min doesn't actually follow a geographical continuum and instead had split off from all the others before the Middle Chinese period ;x

There are also so many varieties of hokkien which makes it frustrating.

bro's ambidexterity is wild 0:33 1:34

love your content.. new sub here... i studied hokkien chinese since kindergarten until 4th year highschool here in the Philippines... now I barely speak the language because after highschool, there is no college offering chinese subjects in my city. I can still speak hokkien but not as fluent as I used to.... now I wanted to learn mandarin hahaha

aw thanks for this wholesome video! as a germany-born teochew I also related to a lot of things mentioned in this video and it feels nice to be represented. when I am with germans they think I am chinese and never cared about the dialects esp when I tried explaining mine, and when I am with mandarin chinese I also felt disconnnected. they were always so nice ngl but I still felt so left out bc I couldn't speak mandarin well as I didn't grow up with mandarin but with teochew and many of them didn't even know about MinNan languages, not to mention Teochew. Also, I have never met any peers/young people who happen to have teochew background like me, at best I had met cantonese but this dialect is also so different. I actually realized I related the most with Malaysians and Signaporeans of chinese background as they also have this identity crisis hahahah. I am just v thankful for the internet and content creators like you, this way one feels less lonely. It is amazing you tried to learn Hokkien, it is not much different to my dialect as both are MinNan languages. have a great day :)

Different pronunciation for the same character is insane and good luck mastering it 😂 Name two example: Family names are usually the colloquial pronuncation but given names are usually in literal pronunciation. Like the Japanese sometimes we need to ask the person to be sure. And for character 後 (back), it has colloquial reading au in 後壁 (in the back), literal hau in 後生 (son, ie. the one born after), and another literal reading hio in 後悔 (REmorse)

your mom is so right.. when you learn a new language, u learn a new culture.. Hokkien can be very beautiful language.. dun give up..

Dude, this vd was awesome! : )

You make me wanna improve my hokkien man!!!

I was raised by my Hakka speaking grandma and Hakka is my first language. However, my Hakka has become very rusty. Recently I started learning Korean on my own and I found out that so many Korean words have similar sounding words in some Chinese languages/dialects (Mandarin, Cantonese...even Hakka). It got me thinking like...going back to relearn your family's languages is a great way to grow your brain. At least, not only will you get to know more about your cultural root , but also you get to use the opportunity to develop your learning skills.

As a mandarin speaker, I need to do this but with Mandarin! There are some pretty out there dialects, and I grew up with local dialect of Mandarin but learning standard in school, so I speak the ??? dialect. I would need to literally learn a little bit.

The romanization of Hokkien is related to the Taiwanese history tho. Some scholars back in the Japanese imperial era even tried to create a better-fitting writing system for Taiwanese(Hokkien). Now in Taiwanese schools, students whose mother tongue is Taiwanese get to learn how to spell and read Taiwanese

As a fellow singaporean, god damn your mandarin is better than mine. I always thought it was useless during school time so I just completely ignored it as much as possible, now I kinda regret it. The thing is, my mom's Malaysian and barely speak any english so I have to converse with her in chinese. My mom's side of the family also speaks (a mashed up version of) hokkien and it sounds cool, ever since I was small. I've always wanted to pick it up, imitating my grandma's words sometimes but my visit to Malaysia was not frequent enough for it to stick. The only few words I remember are the curse words, "I am", and "吵死人" (loud as hell, because I was noisy when I was a brat lmao). Then covid came and in Singapore, yknow, everything's in English. my chinese skills fell like crazy and my hokkien is basically non existant. I want to learn it back but I don't have the drive in me to try hokkien again for to fix my chinese. on a side note, during covid times I picked up Japanese cuz anime, vtubers, felt cool to know a "secret" third language lmao(a lot of people in Singapore actually knows japanese :/). I am kinda proficient in Japanese which is kinda funny, cuz I abandoned chinese for Japanese, not sure how our ancestors would look at it

What a wholesome video!

Such a nice video. You got a new subscriber!

在网上看到砂拉越蒙福教會大人小孩一起唱福建话诗歌，蛮令人感动的。可以去听听，在那样的时候，这首歌。

Thought I was on vox for a sec, too good🤯

wow no bad for the editing man!

penang hokkien podcast is a good resource for SEA hokkien, the dialect in penang is just slightly different from singapore's dialect of hokkien. like other languages, hokkien has its dialect depending on region