Don't buy this Teochew textbook
A friend recently shared a post about a new Teochew language textbook, but before I could look into it more closely, she quickly followed up with “actually, never mind”.
The book is titled “Learn Teochew Language: Conversational Teochew with Dialogues for Beginners”, and is written by Robertson B. Kunz, who, according to his website, is “an author and polyglot who enjoys learning foreign languages. At the moment, he studies Spanish, German, Japanese, Mandarin Chinese, Teochew, Korean, Arabic, Sanskrit, French and Italian.”
That’s a lot of languages! And apparently he feels confident enough to have written and published textbooks for most of them too. That should be a huge red flag, but I was curious about the Teochew textbook, since that is such a rarity, I had to have a look.
The free preview on Amazon covered the acknowledgements, table of contents, and introduction (all in English only), which I skimmed. The very first Teochew words I encountered, though, were the following:
“… the Teochew word for ‘telephone’ is 電話 /tiⁿ⁷-ŭe⁸/ … ‘university’ is 大學 /tua⁷-ha̍k⁸/…”
I stopped reading there. The characters are right (and the same as in Mandarin), but the pronunciation given for the first does not exist, while the second is a mangling of two different pronunciations. For the record, “telephone” is /tiɛŋ ue/ (written in IPA) or [diêng6 uê7] (Guangdong Pêng-im) and “university̦” is either /tai hak/ (IPA), [dai6 hag8] (Pêng-im) following vernacular pronunciation or /tua ɔʔ/ (IPA), [dua7 oh8] (Pêng-im) in literary pronunciation. These are very common words, and all Teochew native speakers and most heritage speakers should be able to tell you what the correct Teochew readings are. The diacritics and what appear to be tone numbers are also meaningless in any transcription or spelling system for Teochew that I know of.
Fellow diaspora Teochew @MăngUâgTeochew has already encountered this book and written a detailed post on the many problems with this book. They see clear signs that it was hastily put together with AI to make money from unsuspecting online shoppers, and the same is likely true of Kunz’s other books. Much of the “Teochew” in the book is inaccurate, actually Hokkien, or purely imaginary.
It is puzzling to me why Kunz would want to do something like this. He has a YouTube channel and other social media accounts promoting his language learning methods. In his book he thanks his mentors and a long list of people who have helped or supported him. That’s a lot of people to disappoint, unless they too were AI-generated.
And of all languages to pretend to be an expert on, why Teochew? If you try to sell AI slop on a language like French or German, you will have many more potential buyers, but there is enough high quality content out there that is also free or inexpensive, you won’t need to dig around the back pages of Amazon listings. With Teochew, there is a real lack of learning materials, but almost everyone who wants to learn Teochew has some personal connection to the language and will very quickly find out if the content is just made up. And frankly there isn’t enough demand to make a living selling Teochew textbooks (if there is please let me know so I can change jobs).
Dont’t waste your time or money on this book (I don’t want to drive further traffic so I am not going to link to the book or its author’s website here). If you are looking for a Teochew textbook in English, my recommendation is the same as MăngUâgTeochew: Spoken Swatow by Alvin and Barbara Koons, originally published in the 1960s but now available as a print-on-demand title. Get the WhatTCSay3 dictionary app for your mobile phone, join the Gaginang Discord server to practice with other Teochew learners, and check out the resources posted online by The Teochew Store.
Posted on 2026-04-04 00:00:00 +0000