Anyone know how to learn Philippine Hokkien? Any learning materials?

Question

senpudim · Answer

@Paul_Gueta listening to music, podcasts is very good to get used to the new language while learning, i will tell you what i do: search for simple phrases, listen and repeat several times only then i learn about grammar.

Leo-chan · Answer

oh I forgot to answer this. Philippine Hokkien is mostly spoken privately at home  amongst Chinese Filipino families, like in my family. It is mostly oral and almost never written because most everyone is illiterate in writing Hokkien and the "Chinese" taught in Chinese Filipino schools is Mandarin but Mandarin is almost never used by Chinese Filipinos because this is only the language of recent mainlander expatriates and tourists. Chinese Filipinos normally speak in either or both English and/or Filipino(Tagalog) and/or Philippine Hokkien and/or other regional Philippine languages of the provinces or a mix of all or some.

In Metro Manila, the capital, we normally speak in Taglish (mixed Tagalog + English) or just Tagalog casually and normally write in English or speak in pure English in formal contexts. Most upper middle class Filipinos also prefer to speak and write in English and usually most Chinese Filipinos these days are upper middle class filipinos. Inside the family and amongst some friends and amongst elderly chinese filipino store vendors and business owners, Philippine Hokkien is commonly spoken especially by the Elderly Generation, the Baby Boomer Generation, and some Gen X Chinese Filipinos. The younger generations such as Millennials and Gen Z and below usually does not speak in Philippine Hokkien but some can understand by ear only or others can speak a little only but normally does not. This is because they are 3rd to 4th generation or more already and this is not taught in school, since school just teaches Mandarin but we seldom interact with mainlanders or other mandarin speakers unless they are in that job field. Hokkien is still the predominant heritage language and elderly community lingua franca in the Chinese Filipino community especially among clan association events, private filchi business, filchi churches, the big filchi owned banks and corporations, but it is not socially required since mostly elderlies and boomers only normally use this. My parents normally uses it but I normally don't but I can understand it and have recently taught myself how to write it.

If you want to learn, there's not much materials or reliable dictionaries out yet, but these past years, it's become popular so there's a few youtube channels and facebook pages and groups who promote it. Here is a youtube channel that tries to teach it: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCH5qyQcBd6h76owK3IU2fmA/videos?view=0&sort=da

The channel owner is, I think, a Gen X Filchi mom so I bet she knows it natively but most everyone is illiterate in terms of writing, because Hokkien actually has it's own romanization with proper spellings, besides chinese characters, and also, Hokkien has its own unique chinese characters that are different from Mandarin. It also has its own grammar, and different set of tones and is stereotonic (tone sandhi). There's a few similarities with other chinese languages too, but it has a lot of unique bits, especially each hokkien dialect of different places also uses their own pronunciations and contains their own unique words only used there. Philippine Hokkien is mostly descended from Quanzhou Hokkien in Southern Fujian, especially that of the area around Jinjiang-Nan'an-Shishi in Quanzhou, but in my experience, the people there in Quanzhou now sound slightly different at least in accent. The vocabulary is still largely similar tho but we use a lot of older terms and other unique local terms. Sometimes we codeswitch Hokkien with Tagalog and English. The Tagalog we use is also often the Spanish loanword, so its confusing if we can say this word is actually Tagalog or Spanish, or I guess, maybe both. I edit a lot in Wiktionary and we've added some of our Philippine Hokkien terms there. you may search terms in en.wiktionary.org and you may find our growing list of unique Philippines-only PH Hokkien terms in en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category:Philippine_Chinese

we haven't added much loanwords from other languages because we can't simply assign chinese characters for these and PH Hokkien speakers characteristically tend to be more of the traditional purist type because the ones who are not, will just not use the language that much. Any loanwords we use are normally deemed mere codeswitching so the language is still mostly chinese in nature. There's a few though that are so old from Spanish colonial times, that the speakers themselves do not normally know that these are not originally chinese anymore, so these ones we still use and are legitimate loanwords.

In Wiktionary, you may search say a Mandarin Chinese term and sometimes, there's a Dialectal Synonyms dropdown list. Simply, click "More" and it will show you the most frequent chinese term for each dialect of each chinese language. Under "Min Nan", we have Philippine Hokkien listed under "Manila (Hokkien)" because the filchi editors there are mostly from Metro Manila that we can confirm these words to be used, but in my experience, filchi from Davao, Cebu, Bacolod, Iloilo, Sulu, etc. and many other provinces, their words are usually mostly the same, although there's a couple of few words they told me they have not heard of before. Also, sometimes we have words that is the same with in Taiwan and sometimes it is more similar to that in Singapore, or sometimes it differs a little in pronunciation, like 你 is like " lí " in Taiwan and maybe Fujian, but it is " lú " in Singapore and Penang island of Malaysia, but we normally pronounce this as " dí " in Philippine Hokkien, as in D as in dog in hard D sound. This is the default pronunciation we have always heard it as. This often happens with terms that start with "L" sound in Fujian and Taiwan, followed by vowel "-i " or "-e " usually turns into "D" sound in Philippine Hokkien. I read this is because they are allophones and is the older Quanzhou pronunciation. We do not do this if it is followed by letter "-a" or "-o" sound. For example, we call the language as 咱儂話/咱人话(lán-nâng-uē), but sometimes some families pronounce this too as "lán-lâng-uē" or "nán-nâng-uē". In PH Hokkien, we call a fellow filchi or to describe something to be chinese in general as 咱儂/咱人(lán-nâng/nán-nâng).

The elderly speak Hokkien like this: 
https://youtu.be/-X1WNILQpuE?list=LL

Also, we are mostly Christian, some are Catholic, some are Protestant. I grew up from a Protestant Evangelical church and school. Some elderly may still practice some buddhist or taoist or old chinese folk belief like Mazu worship or something. Sometimes we have some temples or monuments where the elderly wave incense praying to a cross (especially the catholics) or in some buddhist temple or chinese cemetery, theres a statue of Jesus beside some other chinese statues. we have a big chinese cemetery in Manila Chinese Cemetery, almost as big as a little town because it's been the chinese cemetery there for centuries since spanish colonial times because the non-christian chinese were not allowed to be buried in the consecrated catholic cemetery grounds, so they buried them outside which is basically right next to the La Loma cemetery so it became its own cemetery.

The millennials these days speak hokkien like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6fKfXhR6TN4

The guy does not have a good pronunciation but it's because he normally does not speak with it and that is the norm among the youth. The girl is fine tho. Their vocabulary is also ok.

astasushi · Answer

there are some youtube channels that teach hokkien just search it up

Anyone know how to learn Philippine Hokkien? Any learning materials? See a translation

@Paul_Gueta listening to music, podcasts is very good to get used to the new language while learning, i will tell you what i do: search for simple phrases, listen and repeat several times only then i learn about grammar.

there are some youtube channels that teach hokkien just search it up

Ask native speakers questions for free

Anyone know how to learn Philippine Hokkien? Any learning materials?