Thank you so much for that introduction to Shanghainese. 40 years ago I heard someone speaking Shanghainese and I thought, "Compared to Mandarin, it's like the dust from a butterfly wing." Now, at last, thanks to your perfectly constructed introduction, I can see exactly why I had that impression: All those soft, short, rapid syllables flying by. It really is an extraordinarily beautiful language (let's not call it a 'dialect')!
thats why i prefer speaking it. Its very blunt, short, straight to the point. When spoken calmly its very pleasant to hear esp by women that speak higher pitch. To me, mandarin sounds like a five year old talking. very slow and rigid at times and sounds like a language that's meant to be spoken in riddles.
@@DaReconquistador You can say either say either, I speak it at home and honestly it sounds like VMah more like a blend of va and ma but most of the time i default to ma cause it flows off easier
@@lanjieke I think that a foreigner person shouldn't be held to the same expectations to speaking a language as a native speaker of that language. Native fluency is something that you get through total immersion and coexistence with the language, like osmosis, which 99% of people who learn a language as second language don't get. it's not something that you can just learn in a classroom or by teaching yourself. You can probably only have a real native fluency if you live 10+ years in a place the language is spoken
I speak standard cantonese Chinese but zero mandarin, and my family speaks teochiu. I understand taiwanese. Want to learn shanghainese, hakka, gan, xiang, toisan, hoinam as well.
Hi. Just letting you know that next to no one no one says 你好吗 or 侬好伐 in either language. Source: I've lived in Shanghai for two years and have a Shanghainese wife 😊 Edit: after confirmation from my wife, they do say both in each languages, just not very often and only in the situation where somebody seems to not be okay or is maybe experiencing some life difficulties. They NEVER used it as a way to casually ask "How are you?", for example to a friend or stranger you met in a café.
then they probably don't know how to speak in shanghainese. Nong ho(haw) vah is normally what we say in shanghainese. My parents are 100% purebred shanghai people unlike many people in shanghai today who are migrants from other provinces. There's literally no other way to say it. an uncle i had would just say 'hao' instead of the full 'ni hao' when i greet him. reminds me of the stereotype of native american indians who say 'hao/how' as a greeting.
@@drakke125Channel Okay I just asked my wife and it seems that in Shanghainese they do indeed say 侬好伐, it's just in Mandarin that they rarely say 你好吗, at least comparing to how often foreigners use it. My apologies, there must have a miscommunication somewhere between me and my wife because she and her family are 100% Shanghainese too 😂
@@lanjieke I take back what I said and I apologize about saying they' don't know how to speak real shanghainese since I went off of your observations. Your point is correct that "ni hao + ma" is almost never used for friend/stranger because the 'vah' itself can make it too informal or rude. The 'vah' itself is like a challenge and very suggestive, and because of the tone its considered a more "harsh" version of "how ARE you really". That is simply a shanghainese thing. That's why we never say "nong haw va" because its considered rude and and 'vah' has an angrier/harsh tone to it. Its considered strange and disrespectful to use it that way amongst authentic shanghainese. The other reason why 'vah' is used as you said, is to ask if someone appears to be sad or super depressed, so the added 'vah' has to be carefully used and considered, very delicate. When asking relatives its generally ok to add 'vah' if you're particularly close. A possible and typical reason why real shanghai people are seldom seen using 'ni hao ma' in mandarin (unless talking to someone chinese who you usually assume knows mandarin by default like in a phone call) is simply because they 'don't' speak mandarin as often as they do shanghainese, if at all depending on the culture or environment. The reason why we don't say anything when its 'misused' is because the person saying it is either a foreigner who doesn't know any better or because we don't bother correcting someone who isn't of our family bloodline and its none of our business. A common stereotype is that real southerners and especially Shanghai men are quite the gentlemen. The almost extreme depiction of this stark contrast between the northerner and southerner in the first Ip Man movie with Donnie Yen portrays this. There's a saying in China that there are two types of people in China. One talks with their fist. The other talks with their tongue (like a viper). The northerner is the type to be more likely to be prone to violence and settle their arguments/fights with the fist. The southerner is more likely to go bug-eyed and scream the hell out of your face. But even if the tension was so high between more than two people that it looks like they'll break out in a fist fight, they dont, they stay at that high tension (and sometimes the intensity gets even higher) until they finish the argument. That is way more intense than a fist fight because the beauty of killing and hitting people is that the fight is over within seconds. But today, war is subtle and people today are more likely to carry a grudge, so the suffering and negative effect on a person's life is prolonged from short term to lifetime.
This is where I ramble so don't read unless you have free time The attribute of generosity and hospitality is also something true shanghai people are proud of. My great grandfather was the one who started the family business and the communist party scratched their head at him because he used capitalism to be successful (they don't know how to use capitalism or how to appreciate it). Because Shanghainese is actually more rare than Fuzhou dialect, most people (which I almost say everyone because how rare authentic shanghainese is these days), are not familiar with the cultures of the language like what you mentioned. Back in my parents' days as kids, it was discouraged in schools to speak the dialect. Today they still discourage kids from learning and speaking it, yet its 'hip' for adults to pick up some words or phrases. Its so stupid. Also children in china are 'less likely' to learn shanghainese or be fluent in it, while children of chinese parent(s) outside of china such as new zealand/America/etc, have a higher chance of speaking it because they're constantly exposed to the dialect like I was. My grandparents also speak shanghainese. Currently two of my main cousins also hear it from their fathers and grandparents on my dads side, but only one out of my two cousins can 'understand it' but cannot speak it, while the second cousin can barely understand it at all. I grew up struggling with both mandarin and shanghainese. Thanks to both, I have easier time understanding japanese. My grandpa who speaks shanghainese also speaks canton, so I go to him to ask how to say something in canton to see how similar it is to a JP word that I am suspicious that has a verbal pronunciation that sounds like it could be from chinese. There are way too many words that are similar. I also learned that in certain regions in Japan, their dialect/accent is actually influenced by shanghainese, which is quite a surprise for me. I've only found two particular similarities between shanghai and japanese language. Fun fact, a JP naval officer from the 1960s (particularly high ranking) was quite literate and educated in kanji/chinese characters. Guess how much of his written letter was in chinese characters? Two-Thirds to 80%. Modern japanese writing usually has less than One-third, but this speaks to the changes in JP to move away from chinese characters though in my opinion its because schools are doing poorly in teaching students kanji, not just because students aren't doing a good job in remembering. Its funny cuz seiyuus almost constantly complain about kanji when reading their script like they're reading an alien language.....which to be fair they are.... Random fact: There's a story floating online of a black guy who frequented this particular restaurant owned by a chinese couple. One day the wife shouted something to the husband and the particular phrase/words upset the black guy, who humiliated this couple on social media saying they called him a monkey. The words huo zi and hou zi sound similar but sound the same to someone who isn't 100% fluent with mandarin. In reality they actually said "huo zi lai le", meaning the 'young man is back/has come'. This was actually a compliment you could say and a friendly tone showing that they remember the boy and appreciated his business. I would even go as far as to argue that "huo zi" is a near chinese equivalent to "shounen" in japanese though the direct literal translation would be nan sheng (i can't be bothered typing actual chinese and adding chinese keyboard feature is a chore for me. I'm a strange person because I don't read or write in chinese, only a little bit, so im 60/40 shanghai/mandarin when it comes to language).
i can tell you that majority of the shanghai voices i've come across on youtube so far, for the ones 'teaching' shanghainese to another person, are usually not authentic shanghai speakers (with exception to this girl but she has her own personal accent in) as they don't even have the procurations down correctly of quite a few words in a single sentence. You can also make out their American and/or chinese accent mixed in with the shanghainese and sometimes how awkward they are in speaking it.
Wow I came here just to see how Shanghai is said in Shanghainese. It's really similar to Korean 상해 (Usually Korean say 상하이 but when you read the 漢字 in Korean 發音 it's 상해)
My mum went from Shanghai to Hong Kong when I was born. So I learned Cantonese in school while Shanghainese and mandarin from parents. At home, I will mix the three languages for communications😂
My grandma is a Singaporean shanghainese, my grandfather is a China shanghainese. My family's shanghainese sounds different from this. I can see some similarities, but in some ways it's very different in terms of enunciation!
Even Mandarin that is used by Chinese diaspora in Makassar city, South Sulawesi, Indonesia sounds different than Standard Mandarin in People Republic of China and Taiwanese Mandarin because lost contact woth both China in 1965.
@@faustinuskaryadi6610 It's not just Makassar, but in other parts of Indonesia too like Pematangsiantar, Palembang, etc. Many of the old Tiong Hoa Hak Tong teachers pre-Orde Baru were Southwestern Mandarin speakers from Guangxi. And students generally spoke southern Chinese languages like Hokkien, Hakka, Cantonese, Taishanese, Teochew, Hainanese, etc with their family. Not to mention the standard of Mandarin back then was based on Nanjing dialect of Mandarin, not Beijing dialect like today. So there's a lot of factors at play that affect our accent/grammar/diction.
@@liongkienfai104 Yes, our Mandarin is based on Nanjinh dialect mixed with our ancestors Southern dialect, make our mandarin sounds different to Standar Mandarin for HSK.
1:10 Should be “侬是上海人伐?" instead of "侬是弗是上海人?". The latter is using Shanghainese to pronouce the Mandarin phrase of 你是不是上海人? Shanghainese has a different word order to Mandarin. In this case, the correct form “侬是上海人伐?" follows the SOV and the incorrect form "侬是弗是上海人?" follows the SVO. Likewise @ 2:50, it should be "侬饭吃过了伐?" instead of "侬吃过饭了伐?". Unfortunately the newer generation's Shanghainese proficiency have declined rapidly in the past 30 years due to the Mandarin Only Language Policy. Many don't have a solid grasp on the language as it is not taught in school.
I thought trying to speak Mandarin in Southern China was hard. I am so screwed... Shanghainese is nothing like putonghua... I'm going to need to take a full on crash course before I move there.
3:08 zeh (zay) cheh gu le. This part wasn't translated but it means 'i ate it all/I ate everything", mandarin version might be 'dou chi guo le'. in jp that might be 'zen bu tabe ta/i'
Sorry but Chinese people need to learn the difference between language and dialect. These "dialects" of China are different languages. Yeah they are all Chinese languages but they aren't the same language. It's like Turkish. While turkey Turkish and Azerbaycan Turkish are the same language with different dialects, the kazaks Turkish is quite a different language. Yeah it's a turkic language but that's it.
It sound like different languages in spoken form but appear as different dialect in writing form. Cantonese subtitle and Mandarin subtitle can be understandable by both speakers despite slighty different use of Chinese character. Mutual intelligibility between written Mandarin and Cantonese is higher than mutual intelligibility between written Portugues and Spanish.
@@faustinuskaryadi6610No, what you mentioned it was not real Cantonese writing form, just Cantonese was written in Mandarin, so sure, they can understand each other. But if Cantonese is written in real Cantonese form, then Cantonese speaker and Mandarin speaker can't understand each other even though by writing. So actually Cantonese and Mandarin are mutually unintelligible not only by speaking, but also by writing. Furthermore, writing system can't prove anything, there're some languages don't have writing form, so they are not languages? Thus, if they're mutually unintelligible by speaking, then they're definitely different languages, not dialects.
Shanghainese is actually very much a language, not a dialect. But yes! I too love the way many languages and dialects sound in China. Shanghainese itself is quite unique in the way it sounds though; it's not a tonal language, so that makes it super cool to listen to and it makes picking up the language much easier.
Language Boost that's my greatest reason to explore chinese languages, since i've never self-studied a language 'close to home' :/ but i'm experienced enough to tell that this source of motivation doesn't suffice to learn an entire language >
I love that you did this video and the video with Felix speaking Teochew dialect but I suggest, you drop the part where you try to repeat sentences. Obviously, that's super hard, for a language u don't know. I feel it slows the video down. These 2 vids would be better if you had just asked them how to say various sentences and compared it to Mandarin😆. That would have flowed much better and you could've cranked out many more sentences for your audience to get to see the contrast from Mandarin. I hope you try that next time.
certain words/syllables in shanghainese does not have a written character as its not a written language. There were one or two major points in chinese history where historians and linguists and scholars would come together and debate and decide who's version of mandarin or language would form the base of what will later become mandarin just like how midwestern english became the base for normal american english.
Que pena que una lengua tan ampliamente usada hace no mas de 25 años ahora este siendo barrida por el estado central, tengo entendido que los mas jovenes ya no estan hablando el lenguaje de sus padres y abuelos, el sistema educacional, radio y TV, todo en el lengua mandarin
Do a series, not just one video. We have tons of videos in youtube which introduce a dialect or vernacular languages. We need the whole course and not an introduction.
i would agree with that, you kinda have to learn mandarin first. For me I learned shanghainese first and then mandarin and then i learned both at the same time so it was a weird exp for me.
Nong ho va- how are you Nong sih vah sih sangha nin- are you Shanghainese Nong wui de gang shanghaawu va- can you speak shanghainese Nong che gu ve la va? Have you eaten Wu a che qu le - i have eaten
san hai instead of shan(g) hai is said because that's southern accent, the 'h' in ch- and sh- syllables are silent. Northern speak is known for having the 'full' proper mandarin pronunciation as well as adding 'er' at the end of every other sentence or word they use, which to me is similar (but not the same) as saying -desu at the end of every other sentence or name in japanese. this southern speak is also present in cantonese as well. Its very easy to tell who's guang dong/canton or not. It's as easy as telling who has a boston, new york, new jersey, or other accent in the US if you're familiar with the accents
@@求主指引 the 'proper' way is with the ng, yes, I say 'wu' because its easier to pronounce. Its just weird having both "I" and "hungry" sounding the same. Its weird as heck lol
