September 10, 2026
Today I added the word hi1 mo7 希望, which my aunt told me means "hopefully". When I looked it up on What Teochew Say, they said it means "to hope", and Wiktionary said it also means "hope", to be used as a noun. Of course all of these things feel like the same meaning to me.
One of the things that I decided early on in making this site was that I wasn't going to bother with classifying every word by part of speech. It just felt unnecessary, and many words can be used as different parts of speech! Like how mang7 夢 can mean "dream" or it can mean "to dream".
September 9, 2026
I watched Dear You on Monday! I really enjoyed it, and I understood a lot more than I expected to. I still absolutely needed the English subtitles, but there were a lot of lines that I just understood on my own. (This is way better than when I watched Proud of Me, where I felt like I understood maybe 5 lines in the whole movie)
I also watched Hey, Houlai! and it was really silly with your typical Chinese humor, which I actually quite enjoyed. There is one scene where the villagers all start fighting with each other and one of the older men shouts "mai sio pah!", and it made me realize that I didn't have the translation for "fight" on my website yet. So that's been added.
And I also added one other word. I was talking to my aunt last week and I told her it was storming a lot, and she mentioned pak8 (hail), which was new to me!
September 5, 2026
Remember when I added category names to the flashcards in my August 23 update? Well, that ended up breaking the numbers pages, and that reminded me that I was still using the default mojolicious 500 page! So, I finally fixed the numbers pages AND I added a custom 500 page. It's a really basic page, but hopefully you'll never end up seeing it.
I'm out of town this weekend, so I'm only adding one new word in this update: bland, to describe food. I heard it when I was visiting my mom's family and they were making fish soup, and apparently it didn't have enough flavor initially. My mom said that ma would have said it was jian(6) jian2. This word also had an uncommon simplified character, and if you've kept up with my updates, you know how much work it is for me to properly support those uncommon characters!
September 4, 2026
I've recently started attending weekly Teochew practice sessions with my sister and cousins. (Okay, really, it's just one cousin that's engaging in the Teochew conversations. But it's still cool that the other cousins come to hang out) At this point we're mostly teaching my sister things, but sometimes we mention some words that are either new to me or at least not in my site yet! So here are some translations I've added from our most recent lesson:
- half an hour
- to plant
- stupid
- ribs
I still talk mostly in English to my family, but it's good to be able to say little bits in Teochew. I guess it's easier to start with my sister and cousins than it is to speak with the older generations, but I hope I'll get there too one day.
September 2, 2026
I have been vey inconsistent about whether I announce the new words I add. For a while, that was all that I was putting in these updates, and it seemed kind of like a chore to even post that. So I stopped doing that and now I...sometimes put a list of the new words in these updates. But I don't really like how inconsistent that is. So, I'll probably just include all the new words I add in each update, but I'll hold off on posting if I don't have anything else to say besides that.
Anyway, here are the words I've added since the last update!
- tiger balm
- to spit
- clam
- blue crab
The word I know for "clam" is ham1. But apparently ham1 only refers to ark clams, which I think are found in the ocean. We went clamming at a lake this year, and those clams are not ham1. I don't know what they're called though! We just kept referring to them by the cambodian word, លៀស
Umm, I'm only like 50% sure that's correct, and you'll have to find the pronunciation yourself :P
I also learned that there are multiple ways to say "crab" in Teochew. I'm used to always saying hoi6, but that's only for big crabs! Blue crab is chih8! Does that mean the fish-prawn-crab game should actually be called heu5 he5 chih8? Nah, that doesn't roll off the tongue like heu5 he5 hoi6
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