7 Bullet Points About Languages - Week 86
Stopping giving up, Skipping the basics, Procrastination triggers, and Taiwanese Hokkien!
Hey language lovers,
I hope you all had a magnificent week!
Updates
Mine was tons of fun.
I wrote a lot, had a 2-hour phone call with a Korean friend I hadn’t spoken to in years (all in Korean!), and spent countless hours researching Hokkien and other languages.
I even discovered the Korean island of Jeju has its own language!1
I also listened to 11 episodes of a Korean audio series, read some short German texts found on lingua.com, and did a bit of Ainu.
Talking about Ainu, I’ve got great news! One section of my deep-dive into Ainu needed extra information that I just got last week. As a result, I’ve just updated it.
And!
I’ve decided to open this first article of the Lesser-Known Languages (LKL) series to everybody. If you’re a free subscriber, you should have received it 5 minutes before this newsletter. Otherwise, you can click here to go straight to it!
This will be the only post that’ll be open to everybody, so if you want to discover the world of Papiamento, Sinhalese, Taiwanese Hokkien, and many many more to come, consider becoming a paid subscriber!
Alrighty then, let’s dive into what you came for!
7 Bullet Points
Each week, I share 7 things about languages.
I hope they can help you improve your journey, tickle your curiosity, and inspire you to keep exploring.
A quick reminder first: I’m not affiliated with any resource so far. Every recommendation you find below comes from my own research and experiences.
🎥 One video
how to stop giving up on language learning | break the quitting & restarting cycle ☀ — Leafling Learns
This week’s content about language learning is all about errors and risks, so let’s start with an important reminder:
The goal of language learning isn’t fluency. It’s to not give up.
That’s why I rewatched this video from last year from Julianne. In it, she explains the importance of being more compassionate towards ourselves and forgetting the idea of “progress.”
Instead, we just need to show up. That’s it.
A great reminder. 👍
📚 One article I read
The biggest mistake I make when learning languages — The Language Closet
This piece hit me hard because it was so relatable. Like Zui, the writer, I’ve focused on perfecting grammar too much, too often, for too long.
I love grammar, so it makes sense, right? But what if that exact love is what’s preventing you from falling in love with the real language?
Like Zui, I’m now trying to turn more toward words. I won’t turn to “most common words” lists (because they’re pointless) but I’m now trying to actively look for words and for ways to remember them.
✍🏽 One article I wrote
The Risk of Skipping the Basics in a New Language (on my personal, not-so-much-used-anymore, blog)
Sharing the most popular article of my defunct blog made me go through some old pieces and I fell upon this one. One of my favorites because it was such a personal topic. My stagnation in Korean.
If you ever want to rush the basics of a language to start using it, read this, and you might save yourself from years of frustration.
🎧 One podcast episode
27: Procrastination Triggers — Time and Attention
Chris Bailey wrote one of my favorite self-help books, Hyperfocus. In his podcast episodes with his wife, they discuss productivity topics. In this episode, they shared the 7 triggers that cause procrastination:
Basically, we procrastinate if a task is boring, frustrating, difficult, ambiguous, unstructured, lacks in intrinsic rewards, or when it’s not meaningful to us.
The more of these factors we connect to a task, the more likely we are to push it back. In this episode, they shared how they solved their own procrastination with a few changes.
Hearing about this made me realize why I often procrastinated on my Thai translations earlier this year: it was difficult, frustrating at times, and ambiguous when I couldn’t figure out a translation that made sense.
What are you procrastinating on?
🌎 One cultural aspect
Asking for the Bill Around the World
We talked about head gestures last week, so how about we talk hands today?
And more specifically, gestures to request the bill in a restaurant!
Growing up in France, I thought the entire world used the same gesture as I did: mimicking a signature with the hand.
It turns out that’s not the case.
While this is the most common way to request the bill across countries (especially in the Americas and Europe), the way of signing might differ. Some people actually mimic a signature, while some others will make a checkmark sign only.
In the Philippines and Malaysia, the common sign is to make a square in the air using both hands. This is supposed to indicate the form of a receipt.
In Japan, the most common way to ask for the bill in a noisy environment is to make eye contact with a waiter and make an X sign with the two indexes. This comes from the sign shime (〆) which indicates the “end.”
Despite my research, I didn’t find any other way to ask for the bill with gestures.
Have you seen any interesting ones? Please share in the comments!
And if you want to see more gestures related to money, check out this article. I loved the sign for “I’m broke” in Spain!
📜 One quote to ponder
“Learn from the best, but remember that you can learn from everyone.”— Chris Wojcik
🌐 One Lesser-Known Language (LKL)
Taiwanese Hokkien/Tâi-Gí - The national language that was a dialect
I have to admit, I was really looking forward to researching this week’s LKL.
You see, I’ve been curious about Taiwan for almost a decade.
Despite having never had the opportunity to go there, I’ve learned a lot about it2. One of my influences was the creator of Glossika, Michael Campbell, who made videos about the indigenous languages of Taiwan around 2010.
The language called “Taiwanese” was one of them.
It wasn’t until a few years ago that I learned the real names for this language: “Taiwanese Hokkien” or Tâi-Gí. Today, about 73% of the population speaks it.
Hokkien languages actually come from the Fujian province and are a subgroup of Southern Min languages. Today, there are different variants across Southeast Asia, such as Singaporean Hokkien, Malaysian Hokkien or Penang Hokkien.
We’ll focus on Taiwanese Hokkien though.
The Hokkien language landed on the island around the 1600s as emigrants left the Fujian province to go to Formosa (the name of Taiwan at the time). Due to political chaos happening at the end of the Ming Dynasty in Mainland China, more people left for the island, bringing their native language with them. Some spoke Hokkien, some Mandarin.
By the 18h century, the population coming from Fujian was over one million.
The language kept on growing and was eventually called “Taiwanese Hokkien” (臺灣語) by the Japanese colonizers. That name stuck, although most people now just call it “Taiwanese.”
Before we get into the nitty-gritty, let’s break down a misconception most people (myself included!) have:
Taiwanese isn’t written in Chinese characters.
Well, it is, but its most commonly-used written system is with Roman letters, also called POJ, brought by Christian missionaries in the 1800s. It quickly spread and is now used daily.
The language can also be written using “Taiwanese Kana” (from the Japanese occupation era) and “Bopomofo” (the Taiwanese version of Pinyin3). Finally, the Taiwanese government created in 2006 Tâi-lô, a writing system based on the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA).
Tâi-Gí officially has 8 tones but, as you’ll see below, the 6th tone doesn’t appear. It’s because it’s now consistently associated with the 2nd. That’s why we consider there are only 7.
Taiwanese is primarily a Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) language, although some sentences can use the SOV order. It can even be OSV for sentences in the passive voice.
Finally, let’s turn to a few sentences (written using Tâi-lô):
Lí hó. (你好)→ Hello
To-siā. (多謝) → Thank you.
Guá kiò Mathias. (我叫 Mathias)→ My name is Mathias. (literally: I-“to be called”-Mathias)
Lí kám khì-kuè huat-kok? Bô. (你敢去過法國?無)→ Have you been to France? No.
Guá kah-ì lú-hîng. (我佮意旅行) → I like traveling.
Want to learn Taiwanese Hokkien? Here are a few resources:
A comprehensive list of resources, including videos, PDFs (EN or CN)
Bite-Size Taiwanese, a podcast teaching Taiwanese using Taiwanese.
Glossika’s app (Taiwanese Hokkien only requires a free account)
Did this section make you curious about Taiwanese? If yes, you’re in luck! The next deep-dive, coming out on October 3, is about Taiwanese Hokkien!
In it, I’ll dig further into how the language reached Taiwan, its evolution, and even give you the main grammatical rules of the language so you can kick-start your learning journey.
As always, thanks for reading!
Mathias Barra
You might not be excited about this, but I always thought there were only dialects intelligible with Korean in Korea, so this is truly an interesting discovery to me.
I even switched to learning to use Traditional Mandarin, used in Taiwan, instead of Simplified Mandarin, used in Mainland China.
It’s more complicated than this, but let’s just call it that for this short explanation.
There seems to be a bit of a growing awareness and interest in pre-modern Japanese and Korean dialects among young people in both countries. Some of my students are beginning to explore the various roots of Japanese that ended up being agglomerated into standard Japanese and that we still see remnants of in the various dialects. I've heard similar things from Korean students. So, purely anecdotal evidence on my part, but it seems in line with the younger generations' reckoning with their identities as Japanese or Korean.
Taiwanese Hokkien is widely spoken in my extended family and is next on my list of languages to learn. My mother prioritized passing Mandarin on to me and didn't see as much value in teaching me Taiwanese Hokkien, but I find myself wanting to learn it for culture/identity reasons now as an adult. One of the things that I struggle with is producing the nasal sounds -- looking forward to sifting these resources to learn more!!