Learn Shanghainese online, free: every resource worth using

There is no Duolingo course and no standard textbook. But almost everything worth using to learn Shanghainese online is free: a structured course or two, a surprisingly good dictionary, thousands of recorded sentences, and a community that has been at this for twenty years. Here is all of it, checked in October 2026, with what each is good for.

Updated 2 October 2026 · 6 min read

The short answer

If you learn best from English and want to start today, these are the free resources worth your time, in the order we would use them:

A structured course for the first words and phrases: Mango Languages or Verbavia, both below.
Tatoeba for real sentences with recordings, and Omniglot for a first page of phrases.
wugniu.com and the Wu MiniDict to look up how a character is said in Shanghai.
The 吳儂軟語 Wu Chinese YouTube channel and the 吴语播客 podcast once you can follow some Mandarin, for listening.
Rime with Wugniu, free, as soon as you want to type.

The details, and the catch with each, follow.

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. Babbel, Busuu and Rosetta Stone have none either.

So learning Shanghainese online means assembling a course out of a few lessons, a dictionary, some audio and a way to type it. The good news is that you can do all of that without paying.

Free courses and lessons

Mango Languages: Shanghainese — conversation-based lessons taught in English, with recordings and culture notes. Mango’s own page says the Shanghainese course is free, with no subscription or plan required. The most conventional option, and a good one for the first weeks.
Verbavia — this site. A free daily course from absolute beginner upwards, taught in English: vocabulary in frequency order after a starter block, hand-written grammar lessons, and every phrase recorded in a Shanghainese voice rather than synthesised from the characters by a Mandarin one. The course page says what it covers, and its word list, with a recording for each word, is free to browse with no account. The vocabulary test tells you in two minutes how many of the common words you already know.
吳儂軟語 Wu Chinese on YouTube — the largest free video source, with hundreds of videos including a numbered “跟我学上海话 Learn Shanghainese” series. It is taught in Chinese, so it suits learners who already follow some Mandarin.
Short English videos: LTL’s “Basic Shanghainese Phrases with Richard” and LogicaLing’s “Shanghainese – Learn Basic Phrases with Angela” on YouTube are a few minutes each. Tasters, not courses.
Omniglot’s Shanghainese phrases — about fifty everyday phrases with recordings, free, in English. A good first page; ours is hello, thank you and goodbye.

Free listening

The scarce resource, and the one to collect deliberately:

Tatoeba — the open sentence collection has thousands of sentences labelled Shanghainese, about half of them with a recording by a speaker, translated into English and Mandarin and free to reuse (CC BY). Crowd-sourced, so quality varies, but it is the largest free set of recorded Shanghainese sentences there is.
吴语播客, also on Apple Podcasts — group readings of Shanghai novels, Blossoms (繁花) among them, in Shanghainese. Listening practice for intermediate learners, not lessons.
繁花 (Blossoms Shanghai), Wong Kar-wai’s 2023 series, made in a Shanghainese version: the largest piece of contemporary Shanghainese audio with a script behind it. Films, series and music lists what else is genuinely in Shanghainese.
Metro announcements. Shanghai Metro lines 16 and 17 announce stations in Shanghainese. Short, repetitive, clearly enunciated — exactly what a beginner wants.

A warning specific to this language: do not use a text-to-speech app on Shanghainese text, and check the voice on any flashcard deck that says “TTS”. The characters are shared with Mandarin, so a general Chinese voice will read them fluently, confidently, and in Mandarin — and you will have no way to tell. Only use audio that was made as Shanghainese.

Free dictionaries

wugniu.com (吳語學堂) — a pronunciation database covering around 150 Wu varieties, Shanghai among them. 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. Free, no login; the interface is in Chinese.
the Wu MiniDict (吴音小字典) — a quick lookup run by the Wu Chinese community site, good for checking which character a Shanghainese word ought to be written with.
Wiktionary’s Wu entries — more than 28,000 of them, in English, unusually good on etymology. Almost none has a recording.

Free flashcards

AnkiWeb’s shared decks include several Shanghainese ones — frequency lists, an 800-sentence deck, and a deck from LTL — free to download into the free Anki app. Check where each deck’s audio comes from before you trust it: the warning above applies, and one deck says in its title that its audio is TTS.

Free old textbooks

Three classic textbooks are out of copyright and free in full on Project Gutenberg, with explanations in English: F. L. Hawks Pott’s Lessons in the Shanghai Dialect (revised edition, 1924), Joseph Edkins’s Grammar of Colloquial Chinese as Exhibited in the Shanghai Dialect (1868) and McIntosh’s Useful Phrases in the Shanghai Dialect (1908).

They are fascinating and they are not where to start. Their pronunciation is a century or more old, and Shanghainese has since lost tones, vowels and whole distinctions — the old and new Shanghainese page explains how much. Read them once you know the modern language, as history.

Free reading, and typing

Wu Chinese Wikipedia is the largest body of written Wu anywhere, with more than 48,000 articles. It is uneven as reading practice, because much of it is in a formal register nobody speaks, but it is there and it is free. wu-chinese.com has been the centre of online Wu activity for about two decades: forums, the MiniDict, and a great deal of argument about how to spell things. It is where the Wu Association romanisation — the one this course uses — came from.

Ordinary Chinese input methods work by typing Mandarin pinyin, so writing Shanghainese on a phone means knowing the Mandarin reading of every character first. The fix is the Wugniu schemes for Rime, a free, open-source input method for Windows, macOS, Linux, Android and iOS that lets you type Shanghainese by its own sounds. Step by step on every platform on the typing page.

What costs money, for completeness

《上海话大词典》, edited by Qian Nairong — the standard printed dictionary, organised by Qian’s Shanghainese pinyin. If you buy one book, it is this one.
LTL Language School runs paid in-person and online Shanghainese lessons.
A private tutor remains the best option if you can arrange one; italki and similar marketplaces occasionally list Shanghainese teachers.

What to actually do

A plan that works with the materials that exist, and costs nothing:

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.
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.
Take the grammar in one sitting. There is not much of it. The grammar page is most of what you need.
Install Rime with Wugniu as soon as you want to write anything.
Listen to something made by Shanghainese speakers every day, however little of it you follow — Tatoeba sentences at first, the podcast and Blossoms later.

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. The differences are set out on the writing page.