How to learn Shanghainese: every resource worth using

There is no Duolingo course and no standard textbook. There is a surprisingly good dictionary, a community that has been at this for twenty years, and a short list of things actually worth your time.

Updated 20 September 2026 · 4 min read

Is Shanghainese on Duolingo?

No. Duolingo teaches 42 languages, and the only Chinese varieties among them are Mandarin and Cantonese. There is no Shanghainese course, no Wu course, and no announced plan for one. The same is true of Babbel, Busuu, Memrise and Rosetta Stone.

This is the reason the rest of this page exists. Nobody is going to hand you a Shanghainese course of the kind you are used to, so learning it means assembling one out of a dictionary, some audio and a way to type it.

Dictionaries

This is where Shanghainese is best served, and where to start.

• 《上海话大词典》 (Shanghainese Dictionary), edited by Qian Nairong. The standard reference, published by the Shanghai Lexicographical Publishing House. The 2008 edition is organised by Qian’s own Shanghainese pinyin, which was adopted at the first International Symposium on the Shanghai Dialect in 2006. If you buy one book, it is this one.
• wugniu.com — a character-lookup database covering around 150 Wu varieties, not just Shanghai. You can compare how a character is said in Shanghai, Suzhou, Ningbo and Hangzhou side by side, which is the fastest way to see what is specifically Shanghainese about Shanghainese.
• the Wu MiniDict — a quick online lookup run by the Wu Chinese community site.
• Wiktionary’s Wu coverage — free, patchy, and unusually good on etymology and on which character a word ought to be written with.

The community

wu-chinese.com has been the centre of online Wu language activity for about two decades: forums, the MiniDict, romanisation debates, and a great deal of accumulated argument about how to spell things. It is in Chinese and it assumes you are already interested. It is also where the Wu Association romanisation — the one this course uses — came from.

Wu Chinese Wikipedia is the largest body of written Wu anywhere: 48,308 articles as of September 2026. As reading practice it is uneven, because much of it is written in a formal register nobody speaks, but it is there and it is free.

Typing it

Ordinary Chinese input methods work by typing Mandarin pinyin, which means writing Shanghainese on a phone requires you to know the Mandarin reading of every character first — and the words with no Mandarin reading are close to unreachable.

The fix is the Wugniu schemes for Rime, an open-source input method that runs on Windows, macOS, Linux, Android and iOS. You install Rime, add the Wugniu schedule, and type Shanghainese by its own sounds. It is the single biggest quality-of-life improvement available, and it is free. Step by step, on every platform, on the typing page.

Listening

The scarce resource. In rough order of usefulness:

• 繁花 (Blossoms Shanghai), the 2023 television series directed by Wong Kar-wai, which was released in a Shanghainese-language version. It is the largest piece of contemporary Shanghainese audio with a script behind it.
• Films, series and music — which films are genuinely in Shanghainese, which Shanghai films are in Mandarin, and what there is to listen to.
• Metro announcements. Shanghai Metro lines 16 and 17 announce stations in Shanghainese. Short, repetitive, clearly enunciated — which is exactly what a beginner wants.
• Local broadcasting. Some Shanghai programming is in Shanghainese, though national rules keep presenters on Putonghua outside approved settings.
• Recordings attached to word lists. Our own 1,000 most common words plays each word in a Shanghainese voice, free and with no account.

Courses and apps

• Mango Languages offers a Shanghainese course — one of very few commercial products that does. It is subscription-based and often free through public libraries.
• LTL Language School runs paid in-person and online Shanghainese lessons in Shanghai.
• Verbavia — this site. A free daily course from absolute beginner upwards: vocabulary in frequency order, hand-written grammar lessons, and every phrase recorded in a Shanghainese voice rather than synthesised from the characters.
• A private tutor remains the best option if you can arrange one, and italki and similar marketplaces do occasionally list Shanghainese teachers.

What to actually do

A plan that works with the materials that exist:

1. Fix the sounds first, for a week or two. Specifically the three-way consonant contrast and the glottal stop. Everything else is built on this, and it is the thing no amount of later vocabulary will fix. Start at the pronunciation page.
2. Learn words in frequency order, with audio, as whole words. Not syllable by syllable — Shanghainese tone belongs to the word, so a word learned whole comes out right.
3. Take the grammar in one sitting. There is not much of it. The grammar page is most of what you need.
4. Install Rime with Wugniu as soon as you want to write anything.
5. Listen to something made by Shanghainese speakers every day, however little of it you follow.

One last piece of advice about which system to spell things in: pick one and stay with it. Wu Association and Wugniu disagree on about a third of characters, and switching between them while you are still learning the sounds will cost you more than it teaches. Once the sounds are solid, reading the other is easy. The differences are set out on the writing page.

Sources

1. Duolingo course list (42 languages; Mandarin and Cantonese, no Wu)
2. wugniu.com — Wu Chinese character and dialect database
3. wu-chinese.com — Wu Chinese community site and MiniDict
4. Wiktionary: About Chinese/Wu
5. Wu Chinese Wikipedia: statistics
6. Rime input method: Wugniu schemes
7. Mango Languages: Shanghainese
8. Wikipedia: Shanghainese, on 《上海话大词典》 and Qian Nairong’s Shanghainese pinyin
9. Wikipedia (Chinese): 繁花 (television series)
10. Wikipedia (Chinese): Shanghai Metro Line 16, Shanghainese announcements