Reading Penang Hokkien using Taiji Romanisation

This website uses only one writing system to teach Penang Hokkien, and that's Taiji Romanization. As with all writing systems, Taiji Romanisation has its rules. Learners of the language need to observe these rules to read Penang Hokkien properly. They should not attempt to base their understanding on their own intuition, or on other writing systems that they learned elsewhere.

Taiji Romanisation is different from and is incompatible to other main forms of writing romanized Hokkien, particularly POJ and Tai-lo. Taiji is based on the ASCII (American Standard Code for Information interchange). It is created for use on the standard keyboard.

Tone Numbers
The first main difference is that you don't see any diacritic marks. In other words, there are no accent marks over the letters, like this sîng, or this chiú. The second thing is that every syllable is separated from the next by the tone number, like this, sim3cong3.

The benefit of separating each letter by the tone number is that you can always tell two different syllables apart. A syllable can be a monophthong, diphthong or even a triphthong. Due to the placement of the tone number, you can tell, for example, that hia1 is one syllable and hi1a1 is two. A word written as ana3 [ã] is only one syllable, not two. This is where it is absolutely necessary to observe the rule, otherwise you will mispronounce.

It is often a benefit not to have been exposed to other forms of romanized Hokkien, as there is always a tendency to apply rules learned elsewhere. My advice to people with knowledge of POJ and Tai-lo is to park their knowledge and not let the rules there interfere with what you see in Taiji Romanisation.

Hyphen
Taiji Romanisation does not use the hyphen in the same way as in POJ or Tai-lo. In Taiji, the hyphen is used to show possessiveness (-eh3), classifiers (gor33-ciak1 bang4) and reduplication (ban33-ban33). It is never used to indicate a compound. Compound nouns in Taiji are simply written together, for example ang3mor3tan1, not ang3-mor3-tan1.

Tone Sandhi
The rule of tone sandhi in Taiji Romanisation is very different from that in other systems. Always remember that every syllable must be pronounced based on the tone number shown. Click here for more on tone sandhi.

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About this website

Dear visitor, thank you so much for reading this page. My name is Timothy Tye and my hobby is to find out about places, write about them and share the information with you on this website. I have been writing this site since 5 January 2003. Originally (from 2003 until 2009, the site was called AsiaExplorers. I changed the name to Penang Travel Tips in 2009, even though I describe more than just Penang but everywhere I go (I often need to tell people that "Penang Travel Tips" is not just information about Penang, but information written in Penang), especially places in Malaysia and Singapore, and in all the years since 2003, I have described over 20,000 places.

While I try my best to provide you information as accurate as I can get it to be, I do apologize for any errors and for outdated information which I am unaware. Nevertheless, I hope that what I have described here will be useful to you.