Shanghainese

[liuyuhui007]

Hello eveybody, could anyone here tell me where can i learn to speak Shanghainse on the Internet?

thank for helping

[roddy]

Zanhe.com is the best place to start that I know of.

I think we've had discussion on this before, if you search you'll probably find some useful stuff. Also have a look through the non-mandarin Chinese forum, which is where I'm going to move this topic to.

Roddy

Edit - we have been over this before, but I'll leave this open in case we get some new ideas. See here (found very easily with the search function )

[Pravit]

I was amazed by how this dialect sounds. To me it sounds almost Japanese because of that staccato rhythm, but for some reason I think it sounds European too. Ah, maybe it wasn't such an insightful comment

[naus888]

I was amazed by how this dialect sounds. To me it sounds almost Japanese because of that staccato rhythm, but for some reason I think it sounds European too. Ah, maybe it wasn't such an insightful comment

It also depends a lot on the speaker. Some speakers sound very non-Chinese, and others emphasize the tone more when speaking, and sound more Chinese. Educated Shanghainese speakers of both sexes speak quieter in a lower and more leveled pitch range (from a study by a guy named Zhu I think). Interjections such as "Ah!" "Eh!" are becoming murmured so they are also lower pitched than before.

The main reason why people think it sounds Japanese or European is the gradual disappearance and irrelevance of tones in Shanghainese. Also, like Japanese, Shanghainese has no diphthongs. Mandarin sai is "sa" or "se" in Shanghainese depending on the character. Back in the olden days, people would learn Mandarin sai as "sa-i" (that's how my older relatives attempted Mandarin).

EDIT: I forgot voicing. d'oh! Shanghainese sound less Chinese also because it has a lot of voiced consonants, which other Chinese dialects don't have. A major source of the "Chinese accent" is that Mandarin or Cantonese speakers aren't aware of voiced consonants, and pronounce European voiced consonants voiceless.

[ala]

Retroflex triphthong 帅 shuai in Mandarin is monophthong [sE] in Shanghainese. If only Mandarin was this easy.....

but Shanghainese also has 28 consonants (English 24, Mandarin 22, Cantonese 17) and 14 different pure vowels (so 9 more besides your basic a, e, i, o, u). Swedish speakers have no problem in learning Shanghainese pronunciation, but Japanese speakers with only 5 pure vowels and English speakers with 11 pure vowels will have trouble discerning for example the 3 vowels that "all sound like 'u'." Shanghainese used to have 16 different pure vowels. So the lack of diphthongs is really made up by having an incredibly large amount of monophthongs. Shanghainese does have diphthongs involving medials u,i and y, so like ue, ua, ia, io, etc, for a total of 6 diphthongs. Also the small role of tones is counterbalanced by the larger number of consonants.

[foxlady]

I am chinese girl coming from xi'an for about 4 years, and all of my families are shanghaiese. I can only understand what they say, but can't speak.

[naus888]

I am chinese girl coming from xi'an for about 4 years, and all of my families are shanghaiese. I can only understand what they say, but can't speak.

That's actually very common today

many endangered languages in the south america still have tens of thousands of speakers, but no younger generations speaking it, these languages will surely disappear from the planet in 1-2 generations. the panic many shanghainese researchers feel isn't exaggerated; shanghai may have millions of shanghainese speakers now, but if in each generation 1/4 of can only understand and not speak, then how many generations will it take before there is only a small minority of native speakers in Shanghai?