First of all, thanks to the entire community for your wonderful feedback to my post last month! We’ve received a number of great suggestions and I feel that we have a better understanding of your goals and concerns regarding the topic of dialects now. Today I’d like to address in detail our first series.
Shanghainese
Our Shanghainese series officially launches with its first lesson on April 23, 2010. In total, there will be ten lessons (all covering newbie level Shanghainese content), and one extra show (an introduction to the dialect and the city, which will be published on Saturday, April 17).
Each lesson, as with our Mandarin Chinese lessons, features a dialog recorded by native speakers. These are dialogs you could easily hear on the street or in a restaurant while out to dinner with your friends in Shanghai. We’ve isolated some key words and phrases that will be featured in each lesson’s vocabulary tab.
In presenting Shanghainese we faced a serious challenge. How were we going to transcribe the dialogs? As many of you know, Shanghainese is a spoken language. Despite attempts to establish a writing system towards the end of the 19th century, the dialect still lacks a standardized writing system. Many Shanghainese people use characters from standard Mandarin that approximate their sound in Shanghainese.
For example, the word for “you,” or nǐ in pinyin, is written 你. In Shanghainese the word sounds quite different. Using IPA, we’d describe its pronunciation as: /noŋ/. Shanghainese people often use the character 侬 to represent this sound. Unfortunately this is one of only a few examples in which the word in Mandarin is close to the pronunciation of the Shanghainese word. In many cases there is no clear choice of a character which approximates the Shanghainese pronunciation and also represents its meaning.
You will find that in our shows we have transcribed the dialogs using this character approximation approach. If you mouse over each word or phrase, where there would normally be pinyin you will find the pronunciation in IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) as well as the English translation.
The goal of this series is to both introduce you to a widely spoken dialect (and member of the Wu division of the Chinese language family – the 11th most commonly spoken in the world) and to introduce a bit of Shanghai’s culture and history. The team has been working really hard on this project and we hope you enjoy it!
Other Dialects
We’ve heard strong opinions from a lot of people about what (and what not) to produce for our next dialect series. We have chosen to do 10 shows introducing Cantonese. We’ve chosen Cantonese both because of the fact that it is very widely spoken and because so many of you asked for it. Expect to hear more about this around summer 2010.
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{ 19 comments… read them below or add one }
I am so excited! I hope it can go beyond ten lessons.
I’m also excited–I can’t wait for the 23rd!
“Loads of people asked for cantonese! So we’re making shanghainese first, because that’s where we’re based” ? heh.
What a fabulous opportunity for us students. Can’t wait for April 17 and then for the series to begin.
Hopefully there can be more than just 10 lessons per dialect. Perhaps there can be 10 episodes per season
I’ll definitely be looking into the Shanghainese, but I can’t wait to see the Cantonese series.
@lolshanghai Actually we had already announced we would be starting with Shanghainese (which loads of people asked for). I wrote my last blog post asking what people wanted to hear as our second series.
@rocky This is our first foray into the world of Chinese dialects. We’re really looking forward to user feedback so we can expand these in the future. I imagine down the line we’ll be creating additional series of certain dialects we’ve already introduced.
Cool! I have to travel to Shanghai HQ for work in June so I can surprise/confuse my colleagues with some very basic Shanghainese…it’ll give them a laugh anyway…
There goes 10 lessons in one’s subscription to Chinesepod which people living outside of China cannot use. Maybe the dialect lessons should be a separate subscription instead of part of Mandarin subscription?
That’s not true. I live in the US and speak Cantonese. I have relatives who speak Shanghainese. I bought tapes on the language when I was in Shanghai and never got very far. Shanghainese is considered a cool dialect.
I would strongly consider subscribing to Chinesepod for the Shanghainese. (well, after all my other studies are done.)
Please include in the lessons a description of where Shanghainese is actually spoken, and the slight differences there may be in nearby locations. For example, whether the same terms can be used in Suzhou and other places in Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces, and whether the same type of Shanghainese is spoken in outlying areas of Shanghai, such as Chongming Island.
THAT is too awesome! As long as it’s Chinese, I want to learn it! I’m surprised we’re getting Cantonese. That’s is too awesome!
YAY FOR CANTONESE!!!
Well, shanghainese is cool too. But YAY FOR CANTONESE!! I REALLY hope it’ll be a success and launch into a permanent thing. CPod is great but there are enough mando resources out there that honestly I could go without it. The other languages though really need something like you guys! Especially since they’re more spoken than written, and CPod is audio-based.
@Paulinurus: You can use all the major Chinese languages outside of China just like you can use mando. Shanghainese is the language with like the 12th most speakers in the world (granted most speak mando too). And Cantonese is probably even more useful than mandarin in most countries. Plus from my experience, being able to speak good mandarin + basic cantonese is about 15x more impressive than just being able to speak good mandarin (these days, who can’t?).
p.s. After shanghainese, and cantonese, do taiwanese (閩南話)!
Very awesome you guys! Shanghainese and Cantonese?! I’m really looking forward to it!
I also can’t wait to see the Cantonese series. Keep up the good work ChinesePod
Can you please draw pictures to explain the different tones in Shanghainese? I know about the four tones in Mandarin, and am very curious about what the tones in other Chinese dialects are like.
There is very few resources for serious Cantonese study, even fewer for Shanghai-ese…very happy to read about these options to be offered by Chinese Pod! I’ll be moving to Foshan China in June, so I would love to be able to learn more Cantonese, I hope we will be able to study the ‘funny’ hanzi the Cantonese use that express the different phonetic sounds too.
This is fantastic. Perhaps there could be an add-on subscription for this with far more than 10 lessons eventually though! My grandfather spent the war years in Shanghai as a European refugee and spoke the language. Hearing a German man speaking Shanghainese in Sydney, Australia was a unique experience.
i like china,chinese is very hardly.