46-year-old Koh Guan Rong worked in the trendy advertising industry for 20 years. In 2008, he resolutely chose to leave his job to study counseling and social work, and became an "author" last year.
The year before last, he used illustrations and pinyin to teach his young nephew Hokkien and posted them on his personal Facebook page. As a result, encouraged and urged by friends, he paired 50 daily items from the same series with Teochew and Cantonese pronunciations, and compiled them into a book last year. The 1,500 printed copies sold out in about a month.
In addition to reprinting, Koh Guan Rong also enlisted the help of two seniors to publish reference books with the same content but featuring Hakka and Hainanese pronunciations. This set of reference books is currently available through his online store and some bookstores.
Koh Guan Rong is very pleased that the books have sold well. Besides the children he originally hoped to attract, many buyers are young people, and some are even staff at childcare centers who bought them as teaching materials.
He hopes that through this illustrated approach, he can not only continue to pass on various dialects but also promote parent-child relationships among readers.
Some readers have told him that grandparents at home would take the reference books and read the correct pronunciations to their grandchildren, and the children learned these basic words very quickly.
After spending over 10,000 dollars to publish these books, Koh Guan Rong is already preparing books with content in other dialects, which are expected to be published within this year. He is also currently preparing posters printed with these five dialects to teach the dialect pronunciations of various body parts, which will be published at the end of this month.