Book Review - Spoken Swatow
How can you learn Teochew from scratch? Our website Learn Teochew is intended as a guide for people who already have some exposure to the language and who want to learn more. What if you need something at a more basic level?
I first heard about Spoken Swatow by Alvin and Barbara Koons in a blog post from the Teochew Store. It is a primer in the Swatow dialect of Teochew, written by Christian missionaries (a married couple) from the US who worked in Hong Kong in the 1960s. Although most of us associate that city with the Cantonese language, there is a vibrant Teochew minority there, including churches that still preach in the Teochew language. The book was originally meant to be a guide for new missionaries and pastoral workers sent to work with the Teochew-speaking churches in Hong Kong, however it is also suitable for general use as the focus is on everyday language, not just the church context.
The book comes in two volumes, each about 300 pages long, including the vocabulary lists. It was originally published in 1967 by the American Baptist Mission in Hong Kong, and reissued on Lulu.com in 2016.
As the Teochew Store’s review points out, this book is unlike most Chinese-language primers because it only uses phonetic spelling, without Chinese characters. I think that this is beneficial, because it ensures that the learner first learns the spoken language. For people without any knowledge of Chinese characters, this speeds up their learning because it is well-known that the characters are difficult to memorize. For people who do have knowledge of modern written Chinese (Mandarin), this prevents the temptation to constantly compare Teochew to Mandarin, or to be influenced by Mandarin grammatical forms. The phonetic spelling system used in this book is a simplified version of the International Phonetic Alphabet.
The primer is structured as a series of graded lessons. Each starts off with a short conversation or passage, which contains the vocabulary and grammar to be taught in that lesson. This is followed by drills (pattern exercises), that are modelled after the Cantonese primers written by Parker Huang, who was an influential Chinese language teacher and textbook author (reminiscences about Huang from his family and former students. There are also explanations on various points of grammar. Although it is not a comprehensive grammar, it is still useful as major topics, such as aspect and classifiers are covered. Some prior knowledge of grammatical terminology is helpful, although there is a glossary. If you have previously encountered the 1960s language primers from the US Foreign Service Institute that are now freely available online, the pedagogical approach will be very familiar.
There are some drawbacks to using this text to learn Teochew. Because it was published more than fifty years ago, the language and example sentences may be a bit dated. Unfortunately the book did not adopt the Guangdong Education Department Peng’im standard that is most commonly used today, especially in mainland China, so students will have to learn and get used to a whole other phonetic system (that is still faster than learning Chinese characters from scratch, though). The book does not come with audiovisual aids, so learners will have to find native speakers to help them with getting the correct pronunciation. Finally, it is somewhat hard to find: it has to be ordered online from a print-on-demand service, and international shipping charges may apply.
Posted on 2020-11-05 00:00:00 +0000