Telling the time, dates and prices in Shanghainese

Knowing the numbers is not the same as being able to use them. The words around them — for the hour, the day, the week and the price — are where Shanghainese parts company with Mandarin most often, and most usefully.

Updated 20 September 2026 · 5 min read

Tap 🔊 to hear an example. Shanghainese examples play the recordings from Verbavia’s course, made with a Shanghainese voice; Mandarin examples play a Mandarin voice.

Start with the numerals

Everything here assumes you can count. If you cannot yet, the numerals, the one-syllable word for twenty and what tone sandhi does to a number string are on the numbers page. This page is only about what you attach them to.

The clock

The hour is the number plus 点 tie ‘o’clock’, or plus 点钟 tie tson ‘o’clock’ in full. The question is 几点钟？ ci tie tson ‘what time is it?’

三点 sae tie ‘three o’clock’
两点 lian tie ‘two o’clock’ — two is 两 lian ‘two’ here, not 二, because it is counting rather than reciting a digit.
三点半 sae tie poe ‘half past three’
三点一刻 sae tie ih kheh ‘quarter past three’
三点三刻 sae tie sae kheh ‘quarter to four’ — literally three o’clock, three quarters.
十分钟 zeh fen tson ‘ten minutes’

Two traps there. The first is that 半 poe ‘half’ comes after the hour and means half past it, so 三点半 is half past three, never half past two. The second is that a quarter to the hour is counted forwards from the hour before, as three quarters, rather than backwards from the one ahead.

Which raises the obvious question: is there a way of saying ten to three? Mandarin has one, using 差. I could not find it documented for Shanghainese in any source I could check, and the phrasebooks only ever count forwards. So this page does not teach it. Count forwards and you will always be understood.

Parts of the day

Two of these are properly Wu, and they are built the same way — the upper half of the day and the lower half:

上半日 zaon poe nyih ‘morning’ · 下半日 gho poe nyih ‘afternoon’
早晨 tsau zen ‘morning’ · 夜快 ya khua ‘evening’
夜里 ya li ‘night, at night’ · 半夜 poe ya ‘the middle of the night’

上半日 zaon poe nyih ‘morning’ is the one to notice. Wiktionary records it across Shanghai, Suzhou, Ningbo, Hangzhou and Wenzhou as the regional alternative to Mandarin’s 上午 — so it is not a Shanghai quirk but a Wu one, shared right across the family described on the Wu Chinese page.

The second pair has a nice provenance. A Shanghai phrasebook published for foreigners around 1900 gives morning as 早晨 and evening as 夜快, and both are still in this course’s word list — two words that have been doing the same job in this city for well over a century.

Put them in front of a time and you have a full appointment: 下半日两点 gho poe nyih lian tie ‘two in the afternoon’, 夜里八点 ya li paeh tie ‘eight at night’.

Days of the week: 礼拜, never 星期

This is the single most useful contrast on the page. Shanghainese builds the days of the week on 礼拜 li pa ‘week; Sunday’, with a number after it, Monday being one. Mandarin’s 星期 is not what you will hear.

礼拜一 li pa ih ‘Monday’ · 礼拜二 li pa nyi ‘Tuesday’ · 礼拜六 li pa loh ‘Saturday’
礼拜日 li pa nyih ‘Sunday’ — the day with a word instead of a number.
今朝礼拜几？ cin tsau li pa ci ‘what day is it today?’

Two footnotes. For Tuesday both 二 nyi ‘two’ and 两 lian ‘two’ are heard, with 两 the commoner. And 礼拜 does double duty: on its own it is both week and Sunday, and the number is what separates them.

Today, tomorrow, yesterday

Not one of these is the Mandarin word, and they are among the highest-frequency words in the language, so they are worth the five minutes:

	Shanghainese	Mandarin
today	今朝 cin tsau	今天 jīntiān
tomorrow	明朝 men tsau	明天 míngtiān
yesterday	昨日 zoh nyih	昨天 zuótiān
the day after tomorrow	后日 gheu nyih	后天 hòutiān
the day before yesterday	前日 zie nyih	前天 qiántiān

The pattern is that Shanghainese uses 朝 and 日 where Mandarin uses 天. The same 1900s phrasebook gives 今朝 and 明朝, and Wiktionary marks 今朝 as regional against the standard 今天 — so this is a stable, long-standing difference rather than a recent drift.

Dates

A month is a number plus 月 yuih ‘month’; a day of the month is a number plus 号 ghau ‘day of the month’. A full date runs year, month, day:

三月廿二号 sae yuih nyae nyi ghau ‘the twenty-second of March’
两千零九年 lian tshie lin cieu nyie ‘the year 2009’
今朝几号？ cin tsau ci ghau ‘what’s the date today?’

A year is read digit by digit rather than as a number, and every 2 in it is 两 lian ‘two’. That is the same 两/二 rule as everywhere else, and it is set out on the numbers page.

How long, as against when

An hour on the clock and an hour of duration are different words, and mixing them is the commonest mistake here. 点钟 tie tson ‘o’clock’ is a point in time; 钟头 tson deu ‘hour (a length)’ is a quantity, and takes a classifier:

三点钟 sae tie tson ‘three o’clock’ against 一个钟头 ih ku tson deu ‘one hour’
半个钟头 poe gheh tson deu ‘half an hour’

That classifier is not optional and it is not always 个 — which is a page of its own, on the classifiers page.

Money, and the word Shanghai kept

The everyday word for money is 铜钿 don die ‘money’, and it is literally copper coin — Wiktionary gives both senses, the coin and, by extension, money in general. Shanghai kept the coin word where Mandarin went with 钱. 钞票 tshau phiau ‘money, banknotes’ is the other everyday term.

The ways of asking are all live, and you will hear all three:

几钿？ ci die ‘how much?’ — the commonest.
价钿？ ka die ‘what’s the price?’
多少钞票？ tu sau tshau phiau ‘how much money?’

The unit is 块 khue ‘yuan’. Below it, Shanghai uses 角 koh ‘ten cents’ — and this is a real difference worth knowing: Wiktionary’s table of regional forms lists 角 for Shanghai and gives 毛 for Beijing, Taiwan and elsewhere. A Mandarin speaker reaching for 毛 is reaching for the wrong region’s word.

三块 sae khue ‘three yuan’ · 三块半 sae khue poe ‘three and a half yuan’
一百块 ih pah khue ‘a hundred yuan’ · 两百块 lian pah khue ‘two hundred yuan’

Paying, and objecting to the price

Shanghainese	Meaning	Note
忒贵哉。 theh kue tse.	That's too expensive.	忒 is too; 哉 closes the sentence
便宜点好伐？ bie nyi tie hau va?	A bit cheaper?	便宜 is cheap; 好伐 turns it into a request
我买勿起。 ngu ma veh chi.	I can't afford it.	Literally I can't buy-up-to it
结账 cih tsan	the bill	Or 买单 ma tae, which is commoner in a restaurant
付 fu	to pay	我付。 ngu fu. — I'll pay, and expect to have to insist
现金 yie cin	cash	Though in Shanghai you will mostly be paying by phone

Age

Years of age take 岁 soe ‘years old’, with 年纪 nyie ci ‘age’ as the noun. Ask a child 侬几岁？ non ci soe ‘how old are you?’ with 几 ci ‘how many’; for an adult, 几化 ci ho ‘how much, how many’ is the politer choice, as it does not presuppose a small number. The rest of the question words are on the question words page.

The five that matter

If you take nothing else from this page, take the five places where Shanghainese and Mandarin genuinely differ, because these come up daily:

礼拜 li pa ‘week’, not 星期.
今朝 cin tsau ‘today’ and 明朝 men tsau ‘tomorrow’, not 今天 and 明天.
铜钿 don die ‘money’, not 钱.
角 koh ‘ten cents’, not 毛.
几钿 ci die ‘how much’, not 多少钱.

Everything else on this page is shared with Mandarin and will transfer without thinking about it. What to do with the prices once you have asked is on the food and ordering page, and the rest of what a visitor needs is on the phrases page.