Good Shanghainese Learning Materials: 学说上海话

[ala]

That's true. Shanghainese is very similar in rhythm and pronunciation to Japanese. That makes a Shanghainese much easier than people from other parts of China to speak Japanese. Many Japanese phonetics that don't exist in Mandarin do exist in Shanghainese.

Actually we also make jokes about the similarity between Shanghainese and Japanese. You can make up funny sentences in Shanghainese' date=' which sound like nothing else but a Japanese sentence.[/quote']

like: 鞋子没坏，鞋带先坏。

or like: 坐下来 for sit down and 座れて

The pitch accent patterns between Japanese and Shanghainese are also similar.

For example "chair": 椅子 "itsu" in Shanghainese has same pitch levels as Japanese 椅子 "isu". First syllable flat low, second syllable flat high pitch.

Whereas in Mandarin you would have tonal contours yi3 zi, which would not sound Japanese at all.

Also Wu dialects (which includes Shanghainese) have voiced consonants, which corresponds to the voiced dakuten 濁点 (two dots) on Japanese kana. Mandarin and Cantonese do not have voiced obstruent consonants.

[irishbob]

hey i was wondering if anyone knows of any good books in English for learning Shanghainese? My Mandarin isn't that good but i still want to learn some Shanghainese if that's possible.

Thanks

[Meng Lelan]

Bumping this up. Anyone able to recommend a podcast for learning 上海话? Preferably one with IPA pronunciation too.

[anonymoose]

Unfortunately I don't know of any podcasts for learning Shanghainese. In fact, there are very few resources at all for learning Shanghainese.

However, there is a podcast teaching English in Shanghainese here. It's probably not very useful unless you already have a basis in Shanghainese, but the sound quality is quite good, and it's relatively easy to understand.

[Yuchi]

Here's a recent podcast for shanghainese, it's kind of slow as it goes over only one or two terms per podcast but I supposed that's good for beginners:

http://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/shanghaihua-from-m-and-mx-com/id312859739

[Meng Lelan]

That's the only one I've found so far, M and MX. But no text showing IPA pronunciation, maybe I'll email them and ask. It's good enough for a beginning, for now at least.

[Meng Lelan]

实用上海话 seems to be available on Amazon.cn, anyone tried it?

[taylor04]

I've listened to this one called 学说上海话 (easily found on youku and youtube) before for teaching Chinese people Shanghainese. Although I haven't lived in Shanghai yet and haven't truly started learning any so I can't tell if it's any good or not.

[wushijiao]

The following books look fairly useful, (from another thread):

"上海話生活通- that was indeed the book. Also in the series is 上海話旅游通, and 上海話商務通。

I ended up not buying the book (because I probably wouldn't use it) but the dialogues and vocab and overall presentation all looked very good. The major drawback, however, is that the book is intended for Chinese people, so there's no English. So, it's probably a good resource for those who already know Chinese, but probably less ideal for those who might be just starting.

http://www.hkbookcity.com/showbook2.php?serial_no=117

http://www.hkbookcity.com/showbook2.php?serial_no=77570"

http://www.chinese-forums.com/showpost.php?p=206491&postcount=18

[Goujian]

There are some online learning mats.

(But I don't need them unless if want to get my fluency up, even though i'm a native speaker)

http://www.kiangnanese.com/html/classroom/list_24_1.html (video for learning basic Shanghainese, I think speaking to native shanghainese speakers improves proficiency)

http://wu-chinese.com/minidict/ This is obviously a Wu Chinese dictionary. But I should give a warning though. Some Shanghainese speakers tend to have different accents, so some they might have a slight Ningbo accent (such as myself). For example. 心 in modern shanghainese is pronounced as shin but some speakers still say sin, or 逐 (to chase) in modern shanghainese is pronounced as dzoh but it used to be pronounced as zoh. (and both dzoh and shin are Ningbonese pronunciations)

[Baudelaire]

Here http://tatoeba.org

You can found sentences in shanghainese with audio and translations in other languages

for example

http://tatoeba.org/fre/sentences/show/374265

or

http://tatoeba.org/fre/sentences/show/374339

Tatoeba is a collaborative and free project, so you can add your own shanghainese sentences (or in other languages), notify mistake or ask for more informations about a structure, or simply add the translation in your mother tongue ;-)

Moreover there's a shanghainese to IPA converter here

http://tatoeba.org/tools/shanghainese_to_ipa if you want to have the pronunciation of a given text

Hope you like it.

Edited May 2, 2010 at 10:40 PM by Baudelaire

[calibre2001]

Chinesepod has introduced shanghainese lesson podcast. I'm not sure whether it's serious shanghainese lessons or just basic shanhghainese lessons to tickle the toes of very curious laowais. Unfortunately it's not free. So I would love to hear any reviews if you happened to have sampled it.

http://chinesepod.com/lessons/channels/list/shanghainese

[Meng Lelan]

Mmm, that would be nice if anyone gets to review it.

[Meng Lelan]

Is there an online dictionary showing IPA for Shanghaiese? For example, if you input the characters like "你“， ”好“, and instead of Mandarin pinyin it comes up with Shanghaiese IPA?

[Baudelaire]

@meng lan

I've created a tool for this http://tatoeba.org/eng/tools/shanghainese_to_ipa

and I want to add that we have now more than 2500 sentences in Shanghainese with audios

[Hofmann]

Why are the glottal stops superscripted?

[Baudelaire]

@Hofmann In fact except I'm able to read it, I've no specific knowledge in IPA, I've started collected the data and then a friend of mine (Kellen Parker , the whole story of the data is here http://www.sinoglot.com/wu/tools/data/ ) completed it, but at first there were no tone marks and I've found it was easier to read (at least for me, and to be honnest when I first started it, at this time there were only 60 sentences in Shanghainese, I tought I would be the only one who will ever use it).

And I think Kellen Parker keep it because well it's was already written this way. So as you can see there's no "serious" reason, so if you tell me that I should use a normal glottal stop, I will do it

[Hro]

Shanghainese is supremely difficult guys. I have a Shanghainese wife and Shanghainese is her first language, so it's her first choice whenever interacting with her local friends and relatives. I'm totally immersed by Shanghainese, it's been like this for a while and I speak pretty passable Mandarin. I can't go past the pronounciation difficulties of the Shanghai dialect - they're almost impossible to master for a non native. I know many 外地人 who have been living in Shanghai for decades and still can't utter a word or two besides the "good morning", "let's go eat something", and "thank you". Understanding Shanghainese is a different animal. After a while you start to recognize the assonances (for instance "老" becomes something that sounds like "low" in English") and after 4 years I can somehow make sense of conversations around me, particularly when topics are very familiar such as grocery shopping. It's great that somebody here has assembled some learning materials. Mastering Shanghainese is possibly the toughtest task any sinologist can wish for (besides learning Wenzhouhua... another massacre..)