5. 8 TONES IS TOO MANY
Technically, two of those eight only occur with words that end with "-p", "-k", or the glottal stop "-t". Three more are flat (one low pitch, one medium pitch, one high pitch). One falls, one rises, and the last dips. That's all! Maybe I'll create a video for this...
4. TEOCHEW IS VERY SIMILAR TO MANDARIN
Teochew is in the Minnan group of languages, which, when considering all other Chinese dialects, is the least related to Mandarin.
3. SINCE ALL CHINESE DIALECTS SHARE THE SAME SCRIPT, WE CAN JUST USE ANY WRITTEN CHINESE AND READ IT OUT AND LEARN FROM IT IN TEOCHEW.
That first part is true, BUT, the translation would sound horrible, and unnatural. A little history: Before the 1920s all of China wrote this obscure ancient written language known as Classical Chinese. It's like the Latin of Chinese. So imagine, that every time you have any news, official decrees, or learning of any kind, you'd have to do it in Latin (rather than the language you speak on a day-to-day basis). Well, that sucked, so champions of the people decided to go au-natural... so since the 1920s China has officially written the vernacular, or writing that reflects what people speak. The only problem is that China had all these dialects... so they decided to create an artificial language called "Putonghua" BUT, eventually this created language was lik 98% based on Mandarin anyway, so the other dialects got shafted. Fast forward to the modern day and practically any time you see Chinese writing, you will see Mandarin writing. That's as if English readers had to write their language in German.... well not exactly like that, but you get my point.
So what his all means is that when you see Mandarin writing and try to read it out in Teochew, the basic jist will probably eke through but it will sound ridiculous. For example...
他们不要学中文
Mandarin: Tamen bu yao xue zhongwen.
Mandarin-style Teochew: Tameung buk iao ot dongbhung.
Colloquial Teochew: inang mai ot dongbhung.
Different huh? I propose using Teochew characters (which there are), and Teochew peng-im to learn Teochew. Makes sense doesn't it? I will create a list of common Teochew words that are different from Mandarin. A side note that Cantonese does the same exact thing - they use different characters to write those parts that aren't in Mandarin.
2. I CAN'T EXPRESS MYSELF IN TEOCHEW
That's why you have to learn all the little nuances, phrases, idioms, to do so.
1. TEOCHEW IS A LOST CAUSE/MANDARIN IS WAY MORE USEFUL
If we follow that logic then why don't we tell everyone in the world to stop learning their languages and say keep three around... English, Spanish, and Mandarin. Cool? NOT COOL! The only way Teochew will become useful is when we decide to use it in our daily lives, and to make it important enough for children/adults/non-Teochew people to learn it!
Thanks for reading this diatr... I mean listicle!
-Ty
