A common "complaint" (or rather 發牢騷) from the Cantonese people whom
I met before, that they say they cannot pick up Hokkien
properly, is due to Hokkien having many pronunciations for
many characters.
This is true.
As native speakers, I learnt the many different pronunciations
since I am a kid. For 2nd language learners (like Cantonese
people), it is very difficult for them because Cantonese usually
has only 1 pronunciation per character (either than some
exceptions, like those from
the eng~ing variation which i can
describe in detail in another posting)
Example: The character 熱 can be read
as liet or luaˀ depending
on the context. For liet, it is used in
the context of "a lot of people", for luaˀ,
it is used in the context of "hot weather or environment". As
native speakers, I do not make the mistakes that other learners of
Hokkien might make, because all these are very clear cut.
I give 2 incident of 鬧笑話 by 2 Cantonese speakers in the past whom I
met before.
One girl (Cantonese) was looking down from the office window, and
shouted to the some people in the office (using her learnt
Hokkien), that there's a car at the carpark, the headlights
"tit tit siam, tit tit siam". It was so funny,
that the rest of the people laughed immediately, because she
doesn't know that 閃 in Hokkien has 2
pronunciations, "siam" and "niˀ"
(actually there is one more seldomly used one,
"sĩˀ" used in "lightning"), thus what she said
actually meant "the headlights kept avoiding, the
headlights kept avoiding". To say
"the headlights kept flashing", she should use
"tit tit niˀ, tit tit niˀ".
Another incident by someone (I cannot remember, but he is not
Hokkien), tried to say "mai tsh'ue" to ask someone
not to blow the dust something off the table using his mouth,
but he doesn't know that in Hokkien, there are 2
different usage of "blow", when you say
"the wind blows", you should use
"tsh'ue" (<Chiangchew pronunciation), but
when you use your mouth to blow, you should use
"pun" (which has a character of it's own 〉
"口盆" )
