mispronunciations of characters 盔 and 室

Gang Hiog 江煜 discusses mispronunciations of characters 盔 and 室 where kuê1 盔 is incorrectly said as huê1 花 as in flower and 室 said sib4 濕 as in wet.

kuê1	盔	helmet
tao5kuê1	頭盔｜头盔	helmet
geng3kuê1	鋼盔｜钢盔	metal helmets use by soldiers
sig4	室	room
gang1zag4 sig4	工作室	workshop
ga3sig4	教室	classroom
kuê1sig4	科室	department
sig4lai6	室內｜室内	indoor

 

And if I were you, I would be dying to know what an office is called. Well, it is called a poin7gong1 sig4
poin7gong1 sig4	辦公室｜办公室	an office, a bureau, business premises

You can remember this word for office by recalling “poiⁿ7huag4 辦法｜办法” to mean “a way of doing things or a method of doing something”. If your roots are from Teochew City, you would say poiⁿ7huab4 instead of poiⁿ7huag4.

Next you can remember gong1 as in “gong1si1 公司” to mean company.

If your roots are from Gig’Ioⁿ 揭陽 then you will say sêg4 for room rather than sig4.

Do remember that you can hear the words said from czyzd by inputting the above Simplified characters and then press the sound button by the pronunciation you want to hear. [czyzd stands for Chaozhou [Teochew] yin [sound] zidian [character dictionary]. The acronym is in Mandarin of course.

When I first started re-learning Teochew over 16 years ago, I had to correct many mispronunciations. The only way to do this is to keep the word in my active memory and repeat it everyday many times until it went into my brain and I say things correctly automatically. Even native speakers in our homeland do this all the time to correct any mistakes in pronunciations.