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August 24, 2026

My daily Teochew practice consists of:
  • adding at least one word to the site's database
  • going through a set of flashcards on the site
  • adding words to a separate Anki deck and reviewing those
  • either listening to a recent conversation I had with my aunt or watching a Teochew video and seeing if I recognize all the words or not
  • ...and sometimes I add an update here!

I started my Teochew practice some time this morning. While I was going through my first set of flashcards, I got SO dou2 kung3. And then after I made lunch and ate, I started reviewing words in my Anki deck, and I got SO mak8 siap4. So then I took a nap. When I woke up, I started watching a video, but I really wanted to get outside and ung7 dong6 before it was too late. And now it's almost jap(4) diam2, and I'm finally writing my update.

August 23, 2026

I was doing so well practicing my Teochew every day, and then I went on a family vacation and that all went kaput. You'd think that if I were around my family, I'd be practicing more, but I don't think my brain is there yet. Right now I actually prefer to practice in the comfort of my own apartment when no one is around to hear me. One day I would like to practice more around other people. One day.

My family did teach me some new words while I was visiting, but I didn't write any of it down at the time, so I'm just trying as hard as I can to remember them now. I did ask about how to say "to roll up" (like, an egg roll, or a joint), and while I already had gaoh4 in this database, I swear my aunt always says gap4 instead. And she does! But apparently no one else on the internet uses that word, which is just par for the course.

When I ask about certain words, my family likes to also tell me other words that sound similar. So my grandma brought up the fact that gak4 means horn, and she put her fingers up above her ears. I added "horn" to my database, but I realized that horn can mean either an animal horn or a music horn. When I have these ambiguous English words, I usually add something next to it in parentheses (see the word "fly"), but I wasn't really feeling like doing that here. So I decided to add the category underneath the word in the flashcard! This only shows up when you're not already looking at flashcards specific to one category.

June 10, 2026

One of the topics in the last Teochew Language Lesson with Gaginang was emotions. I was looking through my list of words to see what emotions I knew, and it seemed like I only knew three different emotions: happy, scared, and embarrassed. During our discussion, I remembered that I also knew the words for angry and worried (but I didn't have them on the site yet!) and someone remarked to me

See! You know more than three words!

I guess so! I wanted to know the word for "sad" because it seems like such a basic word. When I asked Soy Go about it, she just said bhoi(7) huan1 hi2, which literally means "not happy". Maybe I knew it all along.

Some of the other members of Gaginang mentioned the term gek(8) sim1 for sad, but when I talked to Soy Go about it, I don't quite think that the word "sad" fully expresses what this means. She said it was closer to meaning worried, because your heart is stressed.

So, I've added a few emotion words to my site, and there is now an Emotions category!

June 8, 2026

Here are some translations I've added recently:

  • fingernail
  • weird
  • to sweep
  • to mop
  • to pick your teeth with a toothpick

I had a very hard time finding the character for "to mop", but I eventually found something suitable by scouring the Gaginang discord. I also saw a link to an old forum, ispeakmin.com, for people that are interested in Min dialects! It looks like it hasn't been active since 2020, but it's probably still a cool resource to look through.

June 7, 2026

Yesterday, I was about to add the word for to blink, nih(8) mak8, when I noticed on What Teochew Say that the nih4 character was rendered as a tofu! And then I looked up the word on Wiktionary, and the simplified character is different and it's also a tofu! 😱 And I was like, oh no, this is too much work for today, and I put my laptop down and started doing something else.

But that was yesterday and today is a new day! And to make this a little less daunting for the next time, I'm making sure to document all the steps I need to take when I need to add these commonly-unrenderable characters to my site.

So, I have a custom font that I created using FontForge. I don't really remember the initial steps for this, but it exists now and it only has a few glyphs defined in it. In order to add more glyphs to this, this is what I do:

  • First I go to GlyphWiki and search for the character I need
  • Then I download it as an SVG
  • Then I open up FontForge and I load my custom font file
  • I scroll down to this character's unicode point, and I double click to edit it
    • Umm, there might be an easier way than just scrolling. I haven't looked into it though
  • I go to File > Import... and I choose the SVG file I downloaded
    • Keep all the default options, I guess. I don't know what they mean
  • Then I go to Element > Round > To Int
  • Then I validate the glyph using Element > Validation > Validate
    • Hopefully, there are no errors, but I know in the past I've seen errors here. What do I do about them? I don't remember. If I ever see other errors again though, I'll try to document it
  • And finally, I generate the font as a woff2 using File > Generate Fonts...

My font is currently named learning-teochew-custom-font2, and yes, whenever I make changes to this file, I tick the number up by one to avoid the browser loading in the old, cached font.

Then I can save it to the appropriate spot in my repository and update the CSS file. That's mainly just me replacing the old font name with the new one, but I also have to update a unicode-range line that defines what characters should be rendered with my custom font:

@font-face {
    font-family: "learning-teochew-custom-font2";
    src: url("/fonts/learning-teochew-custom-font2.woff2" format("woff2");
    font-display: swap;
    unicode-range: U+20895, U+25349, U+2E8F6, U+30291, U+31CC5;
}

I also have to rename the CSS file after doing all this.

So, since I added the word "to blink", I figured I should also add the word for lightning, since it's like, the god of thunder blinking. Something like that. I noticed that mogher has an entry for lightning, and they do this interesting thing to display the non-displayable character: 𱳅 is displayed as［目聂］!

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