#hoisanva

Good start! Already I'm starting to see patterns where some radicals are used in different places. Like how steam has the grass radical on top, maybe indicating a lid on a pot, and how good is made up of woman and child, and how flower has a person in it, maybe because they stand upright like a person

(this is absolutely just how I, personally, am going to try and remember them and might not have anything to do with how they were actually linguistically written down)

I have 18 here on this page, so I think the next few pages will be writing practice with them, trying to memorize them, just generally getting familiar. The video recommended doing all 55 in a week, but aha, that probably won't happen. I'll do my best with these 18 and see where we go from there.

Long time no post (whoops) but I found this! It's for Mandarin, but I think I can modify the beginning stuff especially to help me learn Taishanese. (The later stuff suggests adding tv shows and podcasts with more and more advanced language to your daily life, which is difficult when Taishanese has no movies and tv shows and few youtube videos or podcasts (yes I know I could add Cantonese which has lots of movies and shows but I'm not learning Cantonese yet))

I've taken my notes, now I just need to start making myself a plan of action. In the video, she suggests using Week 1 to get familiar with the tones, which I'm pretty familiar with in my general floundering already, but I could use a refresher

More to the point though, she recommends learning the 55 most common radicals in Week 2, so I'm going to google a list of those, write them all down, translate the pinyin to penyim, and then continue writing them all down until they're familiar. Here is a list with the 35 most common, which I will be using

Mostly I was concerned about the presence of lh in my family's toisan, because in the limited amount I've heard, I don't recall hearing lh. And it's distinctive!

But sure enough, got my aunt to count to 10 and there is was, right on 3 and 4. The sexy sexy lh

Plus confirmation that 2 is ngi and not ngei. That one I have heard a lot, but nice to be sure

All of my resources were obtained from the Taishanese/Sze Yap server on discord, which is filled with several language nerds, lots of fluent and heritage speakers, my illiterate ass, and many lovely people. Highly recommend

About a month ago I got a copy of Jade Wu's Learn to Speak Taishanese 1, which is very exciting! Unfortunately for me, her tone system doesn't make sense to me? It's fine, there's nothing wrong with it, and someone used to speaking Cantonese or Mandarin would likely have no issue with it. It just isn't as intuitive to me as the tone system I'm used to

So I spent most of this month rewriting the entire book, converting the tones

So that's where I'm at currently. I spent fifteen minutes this evening going through the first lesson, mostly just practicing getting consistent with tones

I'm going to be spending a few weekends this summer at my aunt and uncle's (Uncle is teaching me to drive), so I'll try and work up the courage to ask Auntie (ngei32 yi21) about specific pronunciation things. Do we use lh and ng? Do we use ei or i?

I can maybe (?) answer one or two of these? I remember my middle Auntie (lham33 yi21) calling my oldest Auntie (ngei32 yi21) "nei die die" (and my mom "yi die die" but that's not one of the questions), so we might use n instead of ng and ei, but I'm still going to ask, because it's better to be sure. Especially since I don't know if we use lh at all

My recent study list has been mostly languages - Chinese (Hoisanva aka Taishanese), Korean, Spanish, Dutch, Irish, and Russian. I have yet to add German and Japanese to that.  Technically, I'm bilingual as I'm able to speak and understand English and my dialect of Chinese (which is a weird mix of Taishanese and Cantonese due to my parents' upbringing). I studied French in the past for ten years (though it's rusty now). When I get around to studying Japanese, it will be my tenth language! :-)

I've resigned myself to learning Mandarin Chinese at some point, which is quite different from my Taishanese dialect. Cantonese is very similar, but there is still enough differences to Taishanese to make Cantonese somewhat challenging. If one counts Cantonese and Mandarin separately as languages and not just dialects, I might be able to speak and understand twelve languages. :-o

For those who are interested in learning Taishanese (台山話 aka Toisanwa aka Hoisanva), I finally got a chance to put up a web page linking to the Taishanese learning material that I found (as mentioned in my previous blog post, 'Learning Chinese: Cantonese or Mandarin? Or…? Taishanese!').

You may go to Learn Taishanese (台山話) to download the zip files containing the Defense Language Institute's 'Chinese-Cantonese (Toishan) Basic Course' (Audio Material). The link to the text material is also provided there. Please note the information about copyright regarding this material.

~~~C 周婉蓮