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Yeap you probably hit the nail on the head. I'm a native English speaker and I only know a tiny bit of Hokkien. I really struggle with the aspirated/non-aspirat

Yeap you probably hit the nail on the head. I'm a native English speaker and I only know a tiny bit of Hokkien. I really struggle with the aspirated/non-aspirated aspect of many of the consonants. Not sure about the vowel sounds, I found those all reasonably trivial to distinguish. https://mkdict.net/results?query=te%CC%82&page=1&q_type=tw&roman=t&t_dict=moe https://mkdict.net/results?query=te%CC%82&page=1&q_type=tw&r... If you click on the "+" button, there's a voice recording of how to pronounce it. It's from the Taiwanese Ministry of Education. To me it sounds much more like "day" than "tea".

jdmichal 9y ago
The vowel sound definitely matches /e/. It sounds like /ai/, but there's none of the glide that would be present in a diphthong. I ran it by my wife, as she's a native Spanish and English speaker, and she agrees with /e/ over /ai/. Thanks for that link. Very cool site; reminds me of dict.leo.org for German.
- HumanDrivenDev 9y ago
  The vowel sound in day is /ai/? I can hear a slight difference between the vowel sounds in both tê and day. That's something I always just attributed to accent, not a different vowel - but I suppose vowel changes can be very subtle.
  - jdmichal 9y ago
    Er... No, I brain farted. The diphthong in "day" is /eɪ/. /aɪ/ (which I was listing as /ai/ on my phone) is as the word "tie". So maybe that makes it more obvious why it would be easy to confuse /e/ and /eɪ/, especially when your native language only has the latter. Brain heuristics work regardless of whether you want them to or not, and they'll fill in the missing /ɪ/ even if it's not present.