Reading Chinese using Shanghainese pronunciation

[gato]

I asked a 19 yr girl to read a page out of the book I was reading with Shanghainese pronunciation and let me record for my own fun, she was totally embarrassed but after 10 mins I convinced her. When I played it for a male in his 20's he thought it was horrible and said he could do better.

He probably thought it was horrible because she sounded like she had to pause and think about the Shanghainese pronunciation for a number of the words. When I was in elementary school in Shanghai in the early 1980s, we used to read out texts in Shanghainese as a joke all the time. But that was when Mandarin promotion just started and all the kids still spoke Shanghainese outside the classroom and often inside. The schools nowadays are so Mandarinized that kids' Shanghainese aren't as good as they used to be. I often hear young Shanghainese adding Mandarin words for Shanghainese words they don't know when they are having conversations in Shanghainese.

[Tom Higgins]

As for words unique to Shanghainese, are there many Shanghainese who are aware that their word for 東西 in Shanghainese, i.e. me zi, is 物事? Or that the word for 錢 in Shanghainese, i.e. tong di, is 銅鈿?

A thing (东西) in Shanghainese is indeed "me zi" and the characters are 么事. This origin of this Wu dialect word is of different origin from 东西 is. Another such example is that in Shanghainese, "to wash" is "da" (汏).

[Mark Yong]

I found this video of 宋慶齡 Soong Ching Ling giving a speech in the 吳 Wu dialect (I hesitate to say whether it is specifically 上海話 Shanghai dialect).

Comparing the audio with the subtitles, it does sound like she is reciting a Mandarin-composed text ad verbatim using 吳 Wu pronunciation. Would it be considered as reading text using the 吳 Wu 文讀 literal readings for Chinese characters? Are there still an appreciable number of people in 上海 Shanghai who can still read that way, especially now in the light of the recent resurgence of the dialect?

[hbuchtel]

A little off topic, but a great resource for recordings + text is The Chinese Pear Stories.

It has recordings of native speakers of Mandarin 北, Cantonese 粵, Hakka 客, Wu 吳, Min 閩, Xiang 湘 and Gan 贛 describing the plot of a short film they just watched, and includes a transcription of each recording.

[skylee]

縯 is a typo. It should be 演.

[Goujian]

么

That is actually a Mandarin word used in place, 物 is the more accurate word for it, since it is pronounced as 'meh'. Many Shanghainese tend to use Mandarin words to represent Chinese even though they are not entirely accurate.

I found this video of 宋慶齡 Soong Ching Ling giving a speech in the 吳 Wu dialect (I hesitate to say whether it is specifically 上海話 Shanghai dialect).

Comparing the audio with the subtitles, it does sound like she is reciting a Mandarin-composed text ad verbatim using 吳 Wu pronunciation. Would it be considered as reading text using the 吳 Wu 文讀 literal readings for Chinese characters? Are there still an appreciable number of people in 上海 Shanghai who can still read that way, especially now in the light of the recent resurgence of the dialect?

Somewhat, a lot of people at the time had really strong accents, Chiang Kai-Shek and Chiang Ching-Kuo both had strong Wu accents. One of my father's cousins still has a strong Wu accent when speaking Mandarin. Since I didn't have much formal schooling in Mandarin, I was born and raised in the US, my Mandarin tends to have a stronger Wu-like accent. But other than that, the typical Shanghainese accent is not too different than the Standard Taiwanese Mandarin accent, not to be confused with the 'Hoklo-influenced' Taiwanese accent.

As for the last question, sadly, no. Most people were either self-taught, such as myself or learned from some other way.