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.

In the Introduction to the 1874 Chinese dictionary compiled by Samuel Wells Williams, Syllabic dictionary of the Chinese language arranged according to the Wu-Fang Yuen Yin, with the pronunciation of the characters as heard in Peking, Canton, Amoy, and Shanghai (Shanghai: American Mission Press), there is a side-by-side comparison of the same literary Chinese text translated into different regional vernacular languages, including Swatow Teochew. These appear to have been contributed by informants from different parts of China.

Williams’s aim was to show how different the literary “book style” is from the vernaculars, and how different the regional vernaculars are from each other. As he points out, “only in the … examples from Peking and Hankow, are all the characters used in their proper signification.” I.e. regional vernaculars like Teochew often use characters to write words that are not cognate to what those characters represent in the literary language. They may be used because their pronunciation is similar (phonetic gloss), or because they have a similar meaning (semantic gloss). An example of a phonetic gloss is the spelling 做年 for Teochew zo3ni5 (“how”).

This text is a good example for vernacular character usages that were in use at the time. For Teochew, the usages here are similar to those in late 19th/early 20th century Teochew songbooks (I’ve been keeping a list of examples I’ve observed on Chinese Wikisource) and other texts from that era. There was no standard for written vernaculars, but some of these usages go back to the Ming era and possibly even earlier (see 曾宪通 (1991). 明本潮州戏文所见潮州方言述略《方言》 1991 (1) : 10-29). Unfortunately this informal tradition of written Teochew is mostly gone today.

It is through a bit of a fluke that we have this example text in Teochew. Elsewhere in the dictionary, Williams used Amoy Hokkien to represent the Southern Min variety of Chinese. However, when it came to documenting not just the pronunciation of individual characters but an actual vernacular translation, “[t]he teachers at Amoy declared themselves unable to write their colloquial intelligibly.” Just like Teochew, there are Hokkien texts written in Chinese characters (their written traditions overlapped because these vernaculars are closely related and come from neighboring regions), but perhaps they did not agree on which variant characters to use, or did not think that they were sufficiently orthodox to warrant publication.

The base text is an extract from the Sacred Edit of the Kangxi Emperor 聖諭廣訓, an instructional text written in simple literary Chinese that was distributed throughout China to educate local populations on Confucian values. Local literati were supposed to hold public lectures explaining the text in their local vernaculars. The full text is available on Wikisource.

The Teochew (marked below with 潮) and English versions are from the Syllabic Dictionary (page XLII onwards, digitized by Harvard University Libraries). I have added a Pêng’im transcription and notes.

【文】孝者天之經地之義民之行也
【潮】大凡行孝個事。天理之常。人情之正。百姓之行爲也。
dua-huam heng-hao gai se. tiêng-li ze siên. nang-cêng ze zian. bêh-sên ze hêng-ui ia.
Now filial piety is a statute of heaven, a principle of earth, and an obligation of mankind.

行 hêng6 – literary reading, for meaning “conduct, behavior”; compare vernacular reading gian5, “to walk”

天 tiêng1 – literary reading; vernacular reading is tin1

【文】人不知孝父母
【潮】做子不曉行孝爹娘。
zo gian m-hiou hêng-hao dia-niê.
Do you, who are void of filial piety,

子 in this context is probably a semantic gloss for vernacular gian2, “child”. The character is otherwise read as ze2.

【文】獨不思父母愛子之心乎
【潮】做年不想着爹娘惜子兒個心性乎？
zo-ni m-siên-diêh dia-niê siêh ze-ri gai sim-sên hu?
ever reflect on the natural affection of parents for their children?

做年 zo3ni5 – “how”, phonetic gloss for vernacular word wihout a cognate in literary Chinese

子兒 ze2ri5 – “children”, 子 is pronounced as zv in this phrase

【文】方其未離懐抱
【潮】許幼時，未放開胸前抱在手時，
he iun-si, bhuê bang-kui hêng-zoin po do ciu si,
Even before you left the maternal bosom,

【文】饑不能自哺寒不能自衣
【潮】肚困儥得交己食，身寒儥得交己穿。
dou-kung bhoi-dig ga-gi ziah, sing-hang bhoi-dig ga-gi cêng.
if hungry, you could not have fed yourselves; if cold, you could not have put on your own clothes.

肚困 dou3kung3 – “hungry”

儥 bhoi6 – “unable”; phonetic gloss for vernacular word without literary cognate

交己 ga1gi7 – “oneself”; phonetic gloss for vernacular word without literary cognate

【文】為父母者審音聲察形色
【潮】做爹娘個人，聽子個音語聲說，看子個樣相。
zo dia-niê gai nang, tian gian gai im-ghe-sian-suêh, toin gian gai iên-siên.
A father or a mother judge by the voice, or look at the features of their children,

【文】笑則為之喜啼則為之憂
【潮】歡喜就兌子懽喜。啼哭就兌子煩惱。
huan-hi ziu duê gian huan-hi. ti-kao ziu duê gian huêng-lo.
whose smiles make them joyful, or whose weeping excites their grief.

兌 duê7 – “to follow”; phonetic gloss for vernacular word without literary cognate

【文】行動則跬步不離
【潮】行走舉動，爹娘腳步不敢行開。
gian-zao ge-dong, dia-niê ka-bou m-gan gian-kui.
When trying to talk, they leave not their steps;

【文】疾痛則寢食俱廢
【潮】病痛爹娘⿰目鬱食全儥。
bên-tong dia-niê ug ziah cuêng bhoi.
and when in sick or in pain, they can neither sleep nor eat in comfort,

⿰目鬱 – this character for ug8 “to sleep” is not yet encoded in Unicode. Justin Leung on Twitter goes into more detail about this particular word, its etymology, and how differently it has been represented in character form.

【文】以養以教至於成人
【潮】用飯飼大，用規矩教示。到能得𠉛就做人。
êng bung ci dua, êng gui-ge ga-si, gao lêng-dig X-ziu zo-nang
in order that they may nurture and teach them. When [their children] reach man’s estate,

【文】復為授家室
【潮】再該伊母子嬤致房室
zai gai i bho ze bhou di bang-sig
they see to their marriage,

嬤 bhou2 – “wife”, vernacular character

I’m not completely sure how to parse the Teochew version.

【文】謀生理百計經營心力俱瘁
【潮】尋事業百樣計算思想心事磨力全坪艱苦
cuê se-ngiêp bêh-iên goi-seng se-siên sim-se bhua-lag cuêng-pian gang-kou
and scheme for their livelihood by a hundred plans, in which they weary their minds and spend their strength.

【文】父母之徳實同昊天㒺極
【潮】爹娘個功勞真親像大天無底止。
dia-niê gai gong-lao zing cing-siên dua-tiêng bho doin-zi
Parental virtue is truly as limitless as high heaven!

【文】人子欲報親恩於萬一
【潮】做人個子欲報答爹娘功勞。於萬分中行一分。
zo-nang gai gian ain bo-dab dia-niê gong-lao, i bhuêng-hung dang hêng zêg-hung
A man who desires to recompense one in a myriad of the loving acts of his parents,

【文】自當内盡其心
【潮】交己應該在家盡子個心
ga-gi êng-gai do gê zing gian gai sim
must really devote to them his whole heart at home

【文】外竭其力
【潮】在外尅苦子個力。
do-ghua kag-kou gian gai lag
and exert all his strength abroad.

【文】謹身節用
【潮】惜身體儉銀錢。
siêh sing-toi kiêm ngeng-zin
He must care well for his body and be frugal in his expenses,

【文】以勤服勞
【潮】應該尅苦代父兄勞力。
êng-gai kag-kou toi bê-hian lao-lag
in order that he may diligently labor for them.

代 toi3 – “on behalf of”, also pronounced do7 “generation”, dai3 (literary)

【文】以隆孝養
【潮】應該滂沛孝敬［吃］爹娘食。
êng-gai pang-pai hao-gêng koih dia-niê ziah
To enable him to fully and filially nurture them,

吃 – I think this is should be 乞 “to give”

【文】毋博奕飲酒
【潮】不可跋錢着碁食酒。
m-ko buah-zin dêh-ki ziah-ziu
he must neither gamble nor get drunk,

跋 buah8 – “to gamble, fall”, vernacular reading; also pronounced buag8 to mean “to walk, travel”

着碁 dêh4ki5 – “to play chess”, 着 is pronounced deh4 in this context (see Dictionary of the Swatow Dialect), otherwise dieh8

【文】毋好勇鬭狠
【潮】不可好抖力相刣相爭。
m-ko haon dao-lag siên-tai siên-zên
he must neither love to quarrel,

好 haon3 – “fond of”; otherwise pronounced ho2 to mean “good”

刣 tai5 – “kill, slaughter”, vernacular character

【文】毋好貨財私妻子
【潮】不可貪心物件錢財私心嬤子
m-ko tam-sim muêh-gian zin-cai se-sim bhou-gian
nor desire to hoard wealth for the use of his wife and children.

【文】縱使儀文未備而誠慤
【潮】雖然是外面禮貌未到足，而孝心着實
sui-riêng si ghua-ming loi-mao bhuê gao-zog, re hao-sim diêh-sig
Though his manners and accomplishments may be defective, yet his heart must, at any rate, be thoroughly sincere.

【文】有餘推而廣之
【潮】有多多推論到曠曠大大個孝道。
u do-do tui-lung gao kuang-kuang dua-dua gai hao-dao
Let us enlarge a little on this principle.

【文】如曾子所謂
【潮】親像生曾孔子弟子所呾。
cing-siên sêng-zêng kong-ze di-ze so-dan
Tsangtsz’ speaks thus respecting it:

【文】居處不莊非孝
【潮】大家做⿰口匏不正即不是行孝。
dai-gê zo-bhu m-zian ziêg m-si hêng-hao
“It is unfilial to move and act without dignity;

做⿰口匏 zo3-bhu5 - “together”; also written 做垺 (Wiktionary). The character for bhu5 used in this publication is not yet in Unicode, although a proposal has been submitted. [Thanks to @Fishbowl and Justin Leung for the information. Updated 10 Mar 2026.]

【文】事君不忠非孝
【潮】服事王家不盡忠即不是行孝。
hog-se uang-gê m-zing-dong ziêg m-si hêng-hao
“it is unfilial to serve one’s prince disloyally;

【文】蒞官不敬非孝
【潮】做官不敬畏即不是行孝。
zo-guan m-gêng-ui ziêg m-si hêng-hao
“it is unfilial to fill an office without reverential care;

【文】朋友不信非孝
【潮】朋友無信實即不是行孝。
pêng-iu bho sing-sig ziêg m-si hêng-hao
“it is unfilial to act insincerely towards a friend;

【文】戰陣無勇非孝
【潮】相刣個地場無出力即不是行孝。
siên-tai gai di-diên bho cug-lag ziêg m-si hêng-hao
“[and finally], to turn a coward in battle is unfilial.”

【文】皆孝子分内之事也
【潮】攏總孝道人子本等心內個事也。
long-zong hao-dao ring-ze bung-dêng sim-lai gai se ia.
All these things are involved in the duty of a filial son.

The centre opened in 2019 with funding from two brothers, Mr Yeo Eng Koon and Mr Yeo Eng Huat, and is named in honour of their late father, Mr Yeo Khee Lim. It has a multimedia collection, including books on Teochew history and culture, vinyl recordings of Teochew music and opera, posters, pamphlets, and much more, donated by members of the community.

The centre itself occupies a single room, with a great view of the Tanjong Pagar port terminal to the South. On the day of my visit it was raining but after the showers cleared I could see the port with the hills of Sentosa in the background.

Don’t be fooled by the size: there are many treasures packed into this one room. Some of the collection is listed on their website, but there is much more that is not yet online. Anyone with interest in Teochew culture and language can easily spend the whole day browsing the shelves.

One special focus is the collection of vinyl recordings of Teochew music and opera. These are being digitized by the Centre and can be listened to on-site. Many album sleeves, which usually have the lyrics to the songs in the recordings, have been scanned and can be viewed on their website.

I visited the Centre to look for commemorative booklets of Teochew opera movie productions from the 1950s and 1960s, to do more research for my Learn Teochew Opera website. These movies were produced in Hong Kong and exported to Teochew communities around the world. Commemorative booklets contained pictures and writeups of the actors, as well as transcripts of the lyrics and dialogue, and were widely published and sold to fans. However because they were commercial material, they were rarely collected by libraries and are not easy to find today.

When I arrived at the Centre, I asked ther intern, Meixin, to help me look for such booklets. Some time later, the President of Nam Hwa Opera, Mr Toh Lim Mok, dropped in to say hello. When I mentioned what I was looking for, he opened a cabinet and started taking out stacks of these booklets: I nearly fell out of my chair! The picture below shows just a small part of what they have.

This was a very pleasant and productive visit: I not only found what I was looking for, but had to stop myself from being sidetracked by all the other material there.

Many thanks to Mr Toh for the kind welcome, Meixin for her help, and Ms Janet Chong for making the arrangements for me to visit!

For researchers: Contact the Centre by email to make an appointment. The premises are usually not open to the public, so you should contact them in advance. The Centre is located in the Nam Hwa Opera offices on the 11th floor of the Singapore Chinese Cultural Centre, 1 Straits Boulevard, Singapore. Closest MRT stations are: Shenton Way, Downtown, or Marina Bay.

• Added suggestions for further reading
• Complete Pêngim transcription and English translation of 陳三五娘 Dang-san Ngou-niê now available
• Tidied up description of historical Teochew opera scripts, and added our explainer on how to read them.

Hope that our readers will find these useful, please leave feedback if you find errors or have suggestions for improvement!

There are different operas based on this story, in both Hokkien and Teochew opera traditions, because it is well known in both regions. After all, Dang-san’s hometown is near the Hokkien city of Zuan-ziu 泉州.

You can enjoy the music, choreography, and humor of the opera from the comfort of home, because the 1961 version has been uploaded to YouTube by Teochew opera fans. If you need some help understanding the Teochew, we have transcribed the Teochew with both Pêng’im and characters, and also translated it into English here.

Here is an excerpt from the song that Ngou-nio sings when she first steps out of the house to see the lanterns:

https://youtu.be/jkxdZsB5iBo?t=180

***

cug guin-mung, hi bug-zing

出閨門 喜不盡

Stepping out of the inner courtyard’s confines is joy beyond compare

***

mag-zoin gêng-muêh ring cêng-sing

目前景物盡清新

The scene before my eyes is so refreshing and new.

***

dêng ru cên, ghuêh ru gian

燈如星、月如鏡

Lanterns like stars, the moon like a mirror.

***

huê-ciu-ngeng-huê bug-mên sian

火樹銀花 不夜 城

The fireworks’ brilliant sparkle make this a city without night.

This tradition of written Teochew was unfortunately never formalized or used in formal education. These old play scripts, although so valuable to us today, were regarded by literati of the past as low-class and not worth preserving. As a result, all of the existing Teochew texts from the Ming era were either rediscovered in libraries outside of China (in Europe and Japan) or recovered from archaeological excavations.

(Photo: © Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, reused under CC-BY-NC 4.0 license)

This page shows some examples of written Teochew/Minnan expressions. Today’s Teochew writers may use different characters to write the same words, sometimes because more research has been done on the so-called “original characters” (本字) of these words, but also because most people today are not familiar with the old conventions. Teochew character writing is also not standardized, although there are informal conventions that are more widely understood than others.

• 冥昏 mên-hng “evening” (more commonly written today as 暝昏、夜昏)
• 值 di “which/where” (question particle, written today as 底、哋)
• 今旦 gim-dang “today” (not commonly used in modern Teochew)

Variant and vernacular simplified characters are also common. Some readers may be surprised to see simplified characters in a centuries-old text, because simplified characters were only introduced as a common standard in the 20th century. Modern simplified characters however were often based on simplified forms used in handwriting, calligraphy, and vernacular texts like these, so some of them have a long history.

Another possible reason for why simplified characters were common is that they require fewer strokes and are easier to carve into wood. Notice how the simplified character 𭑧 is used instead of 娘 in the half-width text column, where the smaller size would make it more difficult to carve the full-form character.

Education of the literati put a lot of emphasis on correct character forms in calligraphy, but these play scripts circulated among a lower social stratum and were therefore not subject to the same cultural restrictions.

If you are interested in discovering more historical Teochew opera texts to see how much you can now understand, do check out our new companion website Learn Teochew with Teochew Opera, where we link to useful resources on Teochew opera including digitized versions of historical editions.

Is that why they squeeze two lines where a single column should be? Actually this was used to differentiate between lines that were sung to a given melody (full-width) vs. lines that were spoken (half-width).

(Photo: © Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, reused under CC-BY-NC 4.0 license)

Along with the names of roles were also stage directions, like entering (上) or leaving (下) the stage. Other types of actions were indicated with the character 介.

These historical Teochew opera scripts also have such stage directions, but some conventions are different from modern ones.

The most obvious difference is that characters’ names are not used in the text to mark who is speaking. Instead the names of the roles are used. To use a Western example, this would be as if the different arias and lines were simply marked as “tenor” or “soprano”, without specifying which tenor or which soprano character is singing.

Teochew opera scripts were not intended to be read like modern literature. The audience and of course the performers would already be familiar with the story, and the number of characters was also not large. The main roles usually had only one character each.

(Photo: © Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, reused under CC-BY-NC 4.0 license)

In historical scripts like Li-gian-gi there were seven roles:

• 生 sêng - Male lead
• 旦 duan - Female lead
• 淨 zêng - Painted face
• 丑 tiu - Clown
• 外 ghua - Old man
• 末 bhuah - Old woman
• 貼 tiêb - Second female lead

In modern scripts this has been simplified to four main roles: 生、旦、淨、丑, but each can be subdivided further (e.g. 小生、老生……).

Opera scripts also indicate the names of melodies for the lines that were sung. The same melodies were used between different operas, just with different words. Many of the melodies in the Li-gian-gi are still preserved today in the Lam-gueng 南管 musical tradition.

Further reading:

• 潮劇 (Wikipedia)

If you want to read the original versions, the best way to start would probably be to use a modern edition or transcription, e.g. those published by Wu Shou-li, because these clarify parts of the text that are difficult to read, use standard characters, and have puncutation.

However, if you want to see what the original books from several hundred years ago look like, you can find many of them online. The Bodleian Library has a high-resolution digital scan of the Li-gian-gi freely available. However some help may be necessary to understand how to read these historical editions.

In this series, we’ll be introducing some of the conventions and features of these texts that are likely to be unfamiliar to modern readers. We hope that this will make them less mystifying for you, and that you will enjoy the process of discovering them as real books, and not just pretty artefacts to admire.

First of all: Did you know that the Li-gian-gi is actually two books in one?

It was common practice for publishers to include different books in the same printed volume. Maybe this was because it was more economical: perhaps if each book was too short, it was more expensive to carve separate woodblocks? Or maybe it was to entice readers to buy a new book by bundling it with another one that was known to be popular.

(Photo: © Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, reused under CC-BY-NC 4.0 license)

Unlike what you might expect, these two books were not back-to-back, but printed in parallel on the same pages. The upper part (“register”) of each page consists of selections from a Minnan opera known as 顏臣, while the text of the Li-gian-gi is in the lower register. Between the two are illustrations depicting scenes in the Li-gian-gi. To save money, publishers were also known to re-use woodblock illustrations from different books, just changing the captions.

Further reading:

• The Taiwanese scholar Wu Shou-li 吳守禮 (1909-2005) has written and published scholarly editions of many of the most important historical Minnan/Teochew historical opera scripts, including 荔鏡記、荔枝記、蘇六娘、and 金花女.

This is the final post of this series, thank you for joining us on this trip through some common differences between Hokkien and Teochew!

A. 只尾 魚 真 雅 zi-bhuê he zing ngia

or

B. 只尾 魚 真 媠 zi-bhuê he zing sui

[ANSWER BELOW]

.

.

.

.

• Teochew: 雅 ngia2 /ŋia⁵²/
• Hokkien: 媠 súi /sui⁵³/