Gabriel's Blog

  My parents are from Penang and speak Hokkien regularly. Through this, I picked up an intuition for the dialect but little beyond that. Given my extensive exposure to Hokkien, it did strike me as odd that I had no meaningful command of the dialect. Growing up, I was also confused by Singaporean Hokkien. It seemed that many of the few words and phrases I had picked up at home were pronounced differently locally. Sometimes, it was tricky to reconcile the differences. Thus, when my friend mentioned this introductory course in Hokkien, I saw this as an opportunity to pick up some Hokkien and connect to my roots and heritage. Dialects have multiple widely recognised variations which makes it hard to learn independently. Without an authority on the dialect, it is tricky to sieve through valid variations of the dialect from potentially invalid ones. This module has helped greatly with that.  I have a few phrases that I particularly enjoy- the first being “tak-ee ho”. Not only was th...