Listen to Podcast | Teochew: How Do You Say “Wait”

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Podcast Transcript | Teochew: How Do You Say “Wait”

Hello everyone! Welcome back to our Teochew – How Do You Say Podcast. People often say, time and tide wait for no man. We are now coming to almost a quarter of the year 2019. Have you been making good use of your time to practise Teochew? Well, my advice is, get going and don’t wait any longer!

In fact, in today’s podcast, we will be learning how to use the word 等, which means “wait”. I’ll also form sentences using words that you have learnt in previous podcasts before, so there will be opportunities for you to revise and practise! Ok, let’s start!

Have you ever been in a conversation where it gets a little too fast for you? Well, here’s a handy phrase for you in Teochew that I often use it myself – 等等等, 你会得呾加一次无?

If you notice, I deliberately repeated the word – 等 – a few times, so that I can catch the attention of the speaker as well as to express that the pace is a tad too fast for me. As for the rest of the sentence, well…. we’ve learnt the words before. Can you figure out what it means? You can pause the audio here to gather your thoughts, while I 等一下.

Now, the phrase – 等等等, 你会得呾加一次无? – means “Wait wait wait, can you say it one more time?” Did you get it right? I hope so!

Another common scenario where Teochew speakers use 等 is when we pick up a call on someone else’s behalf. In this case, we will say 请等一下, 我叫伊(他/她)来听电话. The only new word here is 伊, which means “him” or “her”. Once again, are you able to figure out what the whole sentence means? Please give it a try and resume the audio only when you are ready!

The first part of the phrase means “Please wait a moment” and the second part means “I will call him or her to the phone”.

Once again, the 2 phrases today are:

等等等, 你会得呾加一次无? and

请等一下, 我叫伊(他/她)来听电话.

Hope you’ve enjoyed this week’s Teochew – How Do You Say Podcast. Feel free to share with us your thoughts by leaving us a comment. My name is Eugene from LearnDialect.sg and 请等 one week for our next podcast!

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 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.