Suzhou dialect materials?

[RuiXue]

That is true. But something in the back of my head tells me it might cost less to go to HK from mainland China, than having those books shipped to Sweden:shock: HK is on my to-go list anyways:D

[Meng Lelan]

I envy RuiXue for having that close resource for learning a dialect...

[RuiXue]

I might have it close at hand. But it doesn't mean I can learn it fast. I only spend about 1 month per year in Suzhou, and that is the maximum per year. The rest of the time I only hear Suzhou dialect if I'm at home when my husband calls home, but quite often when he calls home I'm at work.

My husband can't write the words down in letters so I can't read how to speak it. And as of today, I can't speak even one word of Suzhou dialect even if I am able to hear and understand a little bit by now, and especially when I am in Suzhou. The numbers are especially easy to recognize quite fast:D

But one thing I have noticed between Suzhou dialect and Mandarin is that if a word has an "a" sound in it, like baba, it changes into "o" sound in Suzhou dialect and sounds more like bobo.

It's also a dialect spoken with flat tongue which means zh, ch loses the "h". The difficult part is those "bumble bee sounds" as I call them. Suzhou dialect has many sounds which sounds pretty much like a fly or bee flying by. I still haven't figured out how a human can make those sounds:lol: Sometimes "i" in Suzhou dialect gets a very special sound too. There is a similar "i" in a neighbouring region from where I come, but I can't pronounce that "i" because I speak a different Swedish dialect.

On the bright side: Many words in Suzhou dialect are quite similar to English so they're fully reconizeable even with very limited Chinese knowledge. I remember when my husband and I had been on a boat trip to Newcastle (UK) a few years back, and when he called home to tell about it he said Newcastle in Mandarin because if he had said it in Suzhou dialect his parents would have been confused because it is very much like the english pronounce for Newcastle and his parents speak no english and don't even read letters:wink:

Sorry, long post:oops:

[anonymoose]

My husband can't write the words down in letters so I can't read how to speak it

That is perfectly understandable. There is no standard pinyin system even for Shanghaihua, let alone Suzhouhua. In fact, that is one of the stumbling blocks learning, as no two books use the same system, and thus it is quite difficult to figure out the pronunciation from any given book. You really need audio for this kind of thing.

Whilst it is true that Suzhouhua is similar to Shanghaihua, they are not so similar that I think you will benefit much from using Shanghaihua books. Of course, you don't lose anything by trying (except the cost of the book), but you will have to ask your husband how to pronounce every word in the book in Suzhouhua. In this case, why not just use a Mandarin book? As for writing things down, like Mandarin, every syllable consists of an initial and a final, so the total range of sounds is still limited. You can invent your own system to write these down.

I don't know very much about Suzhouhua, but based on my knowledge of Shanghaihua, a couple of things to be careful about are that there are some initials which sound very similar to each other to an untrained ear, so you may have to pay extra attention at distinguishing them. By these, I mean things like p, p' and b, or t, t' and d. The other is tones. For Shanghainese at least, the tone system is very different to Mandarin, and involves a lot more sandhi. This is one of the harder parts to figure out, and unfortunately, native speakers are not even able to explain the rules very well. (From my experience, most native speakers aren't even aware of tone changes).

[RuiXue]

My husband has no idea about the rules or tones of Suzhou dialect, he just speak it:lol: But I'm thinking. Maybe there is a course in Suzhou dialect somewhere in Suzhou! I have to look that up!

I think probably I would be able to write the sounds down, but then I'd make my own system for it and it's doubtful anyone else would be able to use it:conf

But should I manage to learn Suzhou dialect quite well, then I will share how I did it!

[wushijiao]

One good thing is the books i mentioned seemed to have a romanization system from all the dialogues and words. So, even if the romanization systems differ from book to book, at least they'd be the same for that series.

At first, I assumed there shouldn't be too much difference between Suzhouhua and Shanghaihua. But then again, maybe there is, and the materials may not be useful enough in that regard. It reminds me a bit of an old colleague of mine who grew up in Fengxian and worked in the center of Shanghai, and then moved to Jiading. She said it took her a few weeks to really understand the Jiadinghua! And this is just in the Shanghai municipality itself! (See map).

[RuiXue]

That doesn't really surprise me at all. Most dialects has local variations. In old times my dialect could vary between villages just a few km apart. And I dare say that I'd probably not have been able to understand my paternal grandmother who came from 20km away from where I grew up. She spoke a very local dialect. But she became a vegetable when I was just a couple of months old and passed when I was around 6 years old, so I never had the chance to know her And mind, this is in tiny Sweden just some years ago...

[RuiXue]

I think I might have just googled a treasure!

http://www.suzhouhua.org/

I'm going to have a closer look at that page:D

[anonymoose]

I think I might have just googled a treasure!

http://www.suzhouhua.org/

That site seems like a good resource.

I just had a look, and frankly, I think the difference in pronunciation between Suzhouhua and Shanghaihua is quite substantial. I don't think you will benefit by learning Shanghaihua.

[RuiXue]

I think that site might be very good when I just figure out how to use it. But the way it spells Suzhou under the characters on the site is just about how I'd spell it by listening to locals saying it:)

[Ah-Bin]

Well, the answer to your prayers has arrived, a Suzhou textbook!

实用苏州话

Don't know what it's like though because i haven;t got my own hands on it yet.

[RuiXue]

Amen to that! I'm going to try to find it in bookstore next time in China (Suzhou) or I'll just order it from that web page later on:D It wasn't too expensive either really:)

[Meng Lelan]

Let us know what you think of the text and CD. I always think it's really nice when efforts are made to keep up with a dialect of some language.

[Goujian]

Shanghainese is almost the same as Suzhou dialect, except for some vocabulary and pronunciation differences. They're both mutually intelligible. I think it'll take a week for a native Shanghainese speaker to become completely acquainted with it. (If non-native, then probably a month) I've communicated with Suzhou dialect speaking people in Shanghainese, and it's not that much of a difference. They could understand Shanghainese better than I could understand Suzhou dialect. But I do think their pronunciations, tone sandhi, and vocabulary differences are over-exaggerated.

I suggest learning Suzhou dialect first. But in order to improve it, you have to speak it a lot.

[RuiXue]

At least I've found an iPhone application with Mandarin and Shanghainese words and phrases, it has one weakness though. It only write out the Mandarin so you can't see what characters are actually used when Shanghainese is using more or less or other characters than Mandarin to say the same thing:wall

[Goujian]

At least I've found an iPhone application with Mandarin and Shanghainese words and phrases, it has one weakness though. It only write out the Mandarin so you can't see what characters are actually used when Shanghainese is using more or less or other characters than Mandarin to say the same thing

when in doubt, you could use websites like wu-chinese.com to look for the possible pronunciations.