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[personal profile] hypostatize
Teochew is a Southern Min dialect of Chinese spoken in the Chaoshan region of Guangdong. It is not mutually intelligible with Mandarin or Cantonese.

I'm currently trying to teach myself, but since it's a tonal dialect with eight distinct tones, IPA and Peng'im romanization does not prove helpful in pronouncing tones. It also has tone sandhi rules that I would be interested in hearing in practice as opposed to reading from a text.

Tone table )

Does anyone know of a simple audio reference for pronouncing this dialect? There are a few videos containing basic conversational dialogues, but it has proved difficult to find more formal references beyond Youtube and Wiktionary so far. Teochew is primarily a spoken rather than a written dialect, so I would prefer learning to speak and understand before reading and writing (I predict I will have trouble learning to write as well, since the writing system uses Chinese characters but is not standardized, and there are several words in Teochew that do not have equivalents in other written dialects, but I will get there when I get there...)

Additionally, does anyone have experience learning less-spoken dialects of Chinese as a second language? There are many resources on learning Mandarin (official language of China) and Cantonese (large overseas population) these days, but what about the other hundreds of dialects?

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