Hakka textbook in Japanese

[FutureSpy]

Just sharing:
http://www.aa.tufs.ac.jp/documents/trai ... hakka1.pdf
http://www.aa.tufs.ac.jp/documents/trai ... hakka2.pdf

There are audio CDs, but they told me it's not for sale, and they were only available for those who took their course...

[Ah-bin]

Wow, thanks Futurespy!!

This textbook is in the Meinung dialect spoken in Kaohsiung County in Taiwan, which also happens to be the one with which I became most familiar when I was starting to learn Hakka. I knew a Meinung speaker in New Zealand, and when I moved to Taiwan I ended up having a Hakka-English language exchange with a student from Meinung.

Textbooks and sound recordings in Meinung Hakka are hard to find. I had been putting up with limited word lists and a few academic papers.

This is definitely a very good guide to colloquial Meinung speech. I remember very well learning "ngai-nen" for "we" and "i" for "he/she" from my teachers, and these are the words taught in this book.

Northern TW Hakka uses "Ngai-teu" and "ki" instead. I think there is a lot of Hokkien influence on Meinung.

The problem you will find with Hakka is the dialectal variation is often so great that Hakkas from other places may have trouble understanding the Taiwanese varieties. I still haven't worked out the best one to learn yet. Moi-yen (Meixian) Hakka from China is supposed to be the "standard" (whatever that means for a non-standardised language) but hardly any Hakkas I have met overseas actually speak it. Taiwan has a version very close called Si yen Hakka, and the Meinung dialect is a subdialect of this. There are sound recordings of this northern Si-yen dialect available free online (details a few posts down) and you could use those for listening and pronunciation practice whilst keeping an eye out for the terms that are different in Meinung.

[FutureSpy]

Hi Ah-bin. Good to hear someone actually found some use to that material. Hakka forums here are really dead

I was excited to get my dirty hands on Maryknoll Hakka One, but I really don't know if it's worth exactly because of dialectal variation. I still don't know where the speakers I know are from, and I'm still noway close enough to them to ask for help with the language. Oh, and that reminds me I have something in Hakka that might interest you. I'll email you now

[Ah-bin]

Hakka One is in a kind of Hakka spoken in Hong Kong - Swatheukok Hakka, I think. I have never seen it but I have read somewhere that it is basically Thomas O'Melia's "First Year Cantonese - Part One" put into Hakka.

If you can get hold of that book (Google books seems to have digitised it, but as usual, it;s only available to people in the US) that will give you some idea.

Do you read French? There is a two-volume Hakka coursebook in French from the early 20th century.

You could also find

Hakka-Chinese lessons by Bernard Mercer. That is for the Hakka spoken in Borneo.

The best thing to do though, I think is pick one of the main Taiwanese dialects and use the online resources I posted from the Ministry of Hakka Affairs for sound files and example sentences. I have toyed with the idea of learning Jao-p'ing 饒平 Hakka myself, but decided it would be too hard to find speakers.

[FutureSpy]

Hakka One is in a kind of Hakka spoken in Hong Kong - Swatheukok Hakka, I think.

Hm... I thought Hakka One was edited by Maryknoll Taiwan. I'll ask Fr. Clarence and see what he has to say about it. He once mentioned Hakka Two, but seems like it still hasn't been published yet.

Do you read French? There is a two-volume Hakka coursebook in French from the early 20th century.

Yep, materials in French would be great too! I did a quick search and couldn't find anything on it. I'll try to dig up more deeply later. Any clues to the book title?

Any ideas if the average Hakka from Taiwan can understand Si-yen or Hoi-luk? If they do, I wouldn't mind mixing both, even if it'd result in a very unnatural and incoherent speech. To be honest, I'd like to find some use for my The Little Prince exemplar even if I didn't choose Si-yen... I was thinking of printing some materials and showing them to some speakers to see their reactions. MOE materials would work better since they include more variants, but since I can't read/speak Mandarin and they speak Portuguese poorly, dealing with it would be an overcomplication. So I'll probably go for the Japanese textbook and see how it goes.

BTW, is Meinong some kind of sub-dialect of Si-yen or are they at least close? I randomly chose 10 words from that textbook, and disregarding the tones, 9 of them were identical in both dialects. Perhaps my sample is biased, but since I couldn't find much about the dialect...

I'm also somehow interested in Cantonese too. So I'm wondering, how much intelligibility there can be between a Cantonese speaker and a Hakka speaker in general terms? Hard and very subjective question, I know!

[Ah-bin]

Any ideas if the average Hakka from Taiwan can understand Si-yen or Hoi-luk? If they do, I wouldn't mind mixing both, even if it'd result in a very unnatural and incoherent speech.

They seem to be able to understand each other okay, I think they might be quite used to hearing each other's dialect and that is why. I would just stick to one if I were you.

There is another book:

大家來學客話 by 彭德修 which was the first Hakka book I bought. He explains the differences between both dialects very well, and uses a POJ style romanisation that can be read out as either Hoiliuk or Siyen. It is written in characters one one page and romanisation on the facing page, but is hard to use if you can;t read Chinese at all. I should really have a go at translating it into English some day.

He also wrote a 客家話發音字典 which uses the same system but also gives the pronunciation in the Mandarin phonetic symbols for the two different dialects. Unfortunately there are no sound recordings for this.

BTW, is Meinong some kind of sub-dialect of Si-yen or are they at least close? I randomly chose 10 words from that textbook, and disregarding the tones, 9 of them were identical in both dialects. Perhaps my sample is biased, but since I couldn't find much about the dialect...

Yes, there is a slight tonal difference between Meinung and Northern Si-yen, the other Si-yen dialects in Taiwan use a rising tone 24 (like the tone written as ^ in Hokkien POJ) for the 陰平 tone (the "first tone") whereas Meinung uses a mid flat tone 33, more like the - in Hokkien POJ.

Some vocabulary items are different:

Nothern Si-yen says
"Ngai lau ngi" = I and you

Whereas Southern Si-yen (inc. Meinung) says
"Ngai thung ng"

Here are a few more: (I've been editing this trying to get the spacing right, finally gave up and did it with hyphens!)

Northern -----------------------Southern------------------------------------English
Nau-niet------------------------Niet-nau ------------------------------------busy, lively
chon-vuk -----------------------kui-vuk---------------------------------------go home
An-chu-se-----------------------To-chhia -----------------------thank you (Hoiliuk says "shin mung ngi")
pan-thiau -----------------------Mien-pha-pan ----------------------- rice noodles
Ngi --------------------------------------Ng ----------------------------------you

I have just remembered another book with characters and tongyong pinyin (same as used in Little Prince) which has jokes and stories in both Hoiliuk and Si-yen, called "客家笑料"

The French book is called

Conversations chinoises : prises sur le vif avec notes grammaticales. Langage Hac-Ka,
by Charles Rey

There is also a Hakka-French dictionary which I last saw for sale at 台灣e店 in 2006, and also at the publisher's shop 南天書局 (SMC Publishing) just around the corner. Note that French sources will spell it as Hac-ka rather than Hakka. This should help you find some more materials.

[FutureSpy]

Thanks Ah-bin.

I'll save some money to get those books in French
I should perhaps take a look first at the other book you mentioned the other day with 3 audio CDs..

I would just stick to one if I were you.

So do I. I don't know why I still have these stupid ideas. Not the first language I think of mixing variants... Always happens when I can't decide on only one

I think the best thing I can do now is extract a few sentences from all 5 dialects and put them side by side into a spreadsheet and show a few Hakkas to see what's their dialect and only then decide what to learn

Like, I'd leave Hakka for later, but since I have the opportunity to learn a little now I'd better not miss it... Who knows where I'll be in the future