Listen to Podcast | Teochew: How Do You Say – Delicious Cooked Food

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Podcast Transcript | Teochew: How Do You Say – Delicious Cooked Food

Hello everyone! My name is Eugene and thanks for tuning into our Teochew – How Do You Say Podcast. In this session, we will be touching on one topic that Singaporeans hold very close to our hearts – food!

While the term “food” can be translated into Teochew as 食物, it is rather uncommon to use it when speaking Teochew in Singapore. Instead, we usually refer to food as “things to be eaten” or 食个物件. Specifically, 物件 means “things”. Now, I would suggest for you to keep this in mind, as you’ll soon find that 物件 is a very versatile phrase. In fact, I’ll encourage you to observe how this phrase is commonly used in Teochew conversations and try to pick up the different ways of application!

So how do we translate “Food is delicious” into Teochew then? We do so by saying 物件真好食, where 好食 means “delicious” or “yummy”. Of course, if you have a specific food item in your mind, you can simply replace 物件 with the dish name. For example, 鱼圆面真好食 means “Fishball noodles is delicious”.

Now, I’m a big foodie myself and when I come across a dish that is really yummy, I’ll like to give credits to the person who cooked it, be it the chef or my loved ones. After all, I know that cooking is not easy! Well, for a simple phrase, I’ll say 你煮个物件真好食. This means “the food that you cooked is really delicious”.

A quick recap of what we have learnt today:

• 食个物件, which means “food”;
• 物件真好食, which means “food is delicious”; and
• 你煮个物件真好食, which means “the food that you cooked is really delicious”.

So there you go. Hope these phrases are useful for your next conversation over a good meal! My name is Eugene from LearnDialect.sg and see you next week!

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Our Philosophy for Learning Teochew in Singapore

While we include formal romanization for Teochew words, we are advocates of easy learning. Hence, we encourage you to form your own phonics so that you make an association with these Teochew words quickly. To illustrate, the formal romanization of “Teochew” is “diê ziu“. However, in our ”Can You Teach Me” podcast transcript, you’ll find that we use “teo chew”, which we think relates to us better. That said, you may use other romanization (e.g “dio chew”, “dio jiu“, etc), as long as it helps you to make sense of what you hear.