A Teochew night

And facebook reminded me of my linguistics teochew night in oct 2013...
----------
the crazy linguist in me~ interesting session conversing partially in teochew with a teochew native. Having spent a few nights going through conference notes to prepare for a sharing on L2 listening yesterday,   I could actually visualise my mental processes as I listened to the conversations in rather native teochew with an accent slightly different from my family's, and in context that I rarely discussed about in teochew.  I was decoding the input, parsing words which I have never heard before in standardised teochew, matching some terms into the corresponding Chinese words , and then gaining a global meaning of the discourse. Luckily, my family gave me a rather good grounding in colloquial teochew since young and I had many different sources of input from teochew speakers from all walks of life and quality input from the occasional radio news reports. So after some accommodation and adjustment, as well as familiarity with the context, I was actually able to go beyond global understanding of an accented native speaker, and understand the details (some of which I had heard once in Mandarin ). And more importantly, within a short frame of time, I can feel myself gaining my confidence in approximating the pronunciation of words which I have never said in teochew before or mimicking what I heard a while ago to try and reply more things in standardised teochew. Time to plan for that trip which has been in my mind !