Why is it our people . . .

Why is it our people write our Teochew language so badly? If you were to watch or read items, you would have noticed that we as a whole use the wrong characters or write our Romanised Teochew very badly.

Could it be because a significant number of Teochew people do not have Teochew dictionaries? 

Another problem is that some people drop off the last letter when writing our Romanised Teochew and yet this final letter is an excellent indicator of how to pronounce the word properly.

For example the surname Dang5 陳 and you see some people saying it as Tan. 

I have also noticed this in the Taiwan website and perhaps people are too lazy to pronounce the g at the end of dang.

Most Chinese are able to write HanYu PinYin properly. So why can't they write the Romanised form of our mother tongue properly?

Could it because some governments like the Chinese and Singaporean governments have been so effective with the cultural genocide of the Teochew language?

I have read somewhere that a Teochew person could not use a Teochew dictionary because the person could not read Romanised Teochew. Well, Teochew dictionaries, at least those written by Lin Lun Lun and Zhang Xiao Shan, arrange their characters according to the radicles and stroke orders. 

Let me share with you some interesting things I have discovered with Romanised Teochew.

All characters ending with "b" or "iam" have to be said with one closing one's lips after pronouncing the sound of the characters. Therefore, when one says hib [method of cooking or stuffy], hiam [chilli hot], giam [less], iam [salt] - we close our lips after saying these words. 

All characters ending with oh have glottal stops.

The other thing is that when I find a new character which I do not know how to pronounce, I find similar sounding characters and say them all together like this one below.

lê1 罅		to drop and break		shuai1 摔
lê1 diao7 ke3 罅掉去		been dropped or broken		shuai1huai4 le5 摔壞了｜摔坏了
bê5 扒	cê1 叉	dê5 茶	gê1 家	hê5 蝦	pê6 扒

 lê1 sounds lay lay in English. 

Another reason why our people write our language very badly is because it is used only orally. If this is so, then how will one make notes so one can remember the thousands of words one learn? Can everybody really store so much information in one's wee brain? Would you do the same for Mandarin? 

Do some people think that Teochew is so insignificant that they have this poor attitude to learning Teochew? 

Teochew is a very old language, which is over a thousand years old and it was an official language during the Tang Dynasty. Many people say Teochew is one of the most difficult Chinese languages to learn. 

I suggest that one begins with learning the Romanised Teochew and when one reaches a level of fluency with the language, then one has the option of learning Chinese characters. When one can read and write in Chinese, then one can be an independent learner when one has a couple of dictionaries and use a couple of online dictionaries. 

I recommend two online dictionaries - Mogher and czyzd and the two Teochew dictionaries I recommend are by Zhang Xiao Shan and Lin Lun Lun which can be downloaded in pdf from Mogher. The second edition of Zhang Xiao Shan could be purchased from Teochew Store or Amazon. 

Let us be proud of our mother tongue and keep our Teochew language going by using it with your children, grandchildren and relatives.