“Nong hao!”  That’s HELLO in Shanghainese! 

Have you ever tried studying Shanghainese?  It’s hard.  Harder than studying Mandarin.  That’s because Shanghainese is a spoken dialect mainly spoken in the bustling city of Shanghai which is home to almost 20 million.  This is not a dialect you can open a book and study, this is a dialect that you MUST hear and learn.  There are many sources on the web for those learning Shanghainese.  Let’s look at a few:

Sinosplice has a great couple posts about Shanghainese.  The first one is a list of a bunch of books that teach the dialect but that was published back in 2005.  But there is also a cool flash “click and hear” thing on his website.  That’s really fun and we totally recommend going there!

Danwei.org had an interesting post back  in 2006 about learning Shanghainese but most of those links are not working anymore.

Language hat has an interesting post also from back in 2006 about learning Shanghainese and a few links and some quote about a dialect.  Some of those links are also not working.

Shanghaining.com is a Chinese website that features music and rap from Shanghai.  Go there if you can read Chinese.  We downloaded a really cool 10 minute Shanghainese rap!

PrChinese.com is called Practice Chinese and they have a good description about what Shanghainese is.

California State University at Long Beach has an interesting page of links for Shanghainese.  The site was last updated back in 2007.

Soyouwanttolearnalanguage website has a list of links for Shanghainese which is useful.  But it only has one podcast listed there.  Only one.

Omniglot has a page on Shanghainese pronunciation which is useful if you know the INTERNATIONAL PHONETIC ALPHABET.

Wikipedia has a great in depth post on Shanghainese.  For most though it will be TOO in depth.  We found it really interesting!

Shanghai Dialect.com is an interesting website that has collected a lot of words and phrases for the learner of Shanghainese.  The site is difficult to work through but pretty cool.  The only problem is, no sound.

Shanghai Texts from Lance Eccles from University of West Sydney which is a free e-book on PDF that you can download and learn about Shanghainese.  COOL!

Wangjianshuo’s website has a couple posts about Shanghainese.  He talks about an age old question for those coming to China, Should I learn Mandarin or Shanghainese? These posts though are from a long time ago.

Annals of Wu is a great intellectual site about the WU dialect which Shanghainese belongs to.  From time to time they post up an audio file which helps a lot.  Plus the site looks really cool too!

Shanghaiist is a website where you can get all the news about Shanghai and a few stories here and there about Shanghainese.  There are stories about typing Shanghainese, and helping the Shanghainese prepare for the World Expo which comes next year.  But these two posts in particular are a few years old.

Finally, our site’s M and MX Shanghainese Podcast is a great way to learn the Shanghainese dialect.  It’s painless and fun and for both Chinese speakers and English speakers!  Start a new hobby today! The podcasts are short and sweet and sometimes use personal stories that add to the learning fun!  At publishing time there are over 30 podcasts on our site, www.mandmx.com/shanghainese We’re also on iTunes.  If you search for Shanghainese you will find it.  Start learning Shanghainese today!

“Zai Wei”  That’s BYE in Shanghainese!

Tags: 上海, 上海话, Shanghai, Shanghaihua, Shanghainese

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 27th, 2009 at 12:00 am and is filed under 2009, Posts, Shanghaihua. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.