Listen to Podcast | Hokkien: How Do You Say “What is Your Name?”

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Podcast Transcript | Hokkien: How Do You Say “What is Your Name?”

你好, 食好未? My name is Eugene and welcome to How Do You Say Podcast on LearnDialect.sg!

Today, you will be learning some a couple of phrases for self-introduction in Hokkien, namely 你好, 我的名是 and 你叫什么名.

For the first phrase, 你好, 我的名是 means “Hello, my name is”.

你好, as what we learnt in our previous lesson, means “Hello”.

我的名是 means “my name is”. So in my case, I would say 你好, 我的名是 Eugene.

Now pause the audio and give it a try. 你好, 我的名是

Isn’t it great that you have learnt how to introduce your name? Now, conversations are always two ways and if you have introduced yourself, wouldn’t you want to find out the name of the person whom you are speaking to as well? In this case, you would ask 你叫什么名? which means “What is your name?”

Once again, 你叫什么名?

Now, let’s go over the 2 phrases again.

你好, 我的名是 (your name)

你叫什么名

There you go! Besides learning how to introduce yourself, you are beginning to learn how to strike a conversation!

Remember, practice is the key. Don’t be afraid to start speaking in Hokkien! In the next post, you will learn other common conversation phrases and expressions.

Thank you for listening in to our Hokkien – How Do You Say Podcast on LearnDialect.sg and see you the next time!

Love what you are reading? We’ve got lots more to share during our Hokkien, Teochew and Cantonese express workshops. Join us to pick up words and phrases for everyday use in Singapore. More importantly, you can help to keep these languages alive!

Our Philosophy for Learning Hokkien in Singapore

The pronunciation of Hokkien words varies from one region to another. For example, Penang Hokkien sounds different from Taiwanese Hokkien. At LearnDialect.sg, we want to make learning Hokkien fun, easy and practical for daily conversations in Singapore. As such, we think it is important to listen to how Singaporeans speak Hokkien. To do that, we have an ongoing process of collecting audio recordings from at least 100 Hokkien-speaking seniors in Singapore and thereafter based our audio pronunciation on the most commonly-heard version.

In similar nature, rather than trying to figure out which Hokkien romanization system to use (e.g. Pe̍h-ōe-jī or Taiwan Romanization System), we encourage you to form your own phonics, so that you make an association with these Hokkien words in the quickest way possible. To illustrate, the formal romanization of the English word, “eat”, is “chia̍h” in Hokkien. However, in our “Have You Eaten” podcast transcript, you’ll find that we use “jiak”, which we think relates to us better. That said, you may use other romanization (e.g “chiah”, “jia”, etc), as long as it helps you to make sense of what you hear.