50 words that differ in Shanghainese and Mandarin

Shanghainese and Mandarin share most of their vocabulary, but the commonest everyday words are different words, not different pronunciations of the same one. Here are fifty of them side by side: 侬 non ‘you’ against 你 nǐ, 物事 meh zy ‘thing’ against 东西 dōngxi, 白相 bah sian ‘to play’ against 玩 wán. Every one has a recording in each language.

Updated 16 October 2026 · 4 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.

Fifty words, side by side

Each row is one meaning. The Shanghainese word is given in characters with its pronunciation in the romanisation Verbavia’s course uses; the Mandarin word is given with pinyin. All fifty Shanghainese words are in the course, and the Mandarin word beside each is the one the course itself names as its counterpart.

People

Questions and small words

Time

Home and things

Doing things

Describing, and goodbye

A Mandarin speaker can read most of the Shanghainese column, because the characters are familiar ones. What they cannot do is predict it. Knowing 玩 wán does not tell you that Shanghai says 白相 bah sian.

Patterns you can see in the list

The fifty are not fifty separate facts. Several habits of Shanghainese show up more than once.

• 朝 where Mandarin has 天. Today is 今朝 cin tsau and tomorrow is 明朝 men tsau, where Mandarin has 今天 jīntiān and 明天 míngtiān.
• 拉 makes a pronoun plural. 伊 yi ‘he, she’ becomes 伊拉 yi la ‘they’, and we is 阿拉 a la. Mandarin adds 们 instead: 他们 tāmen, 我们 wǒmen.
• 阿 in front of family words. 阿弟 a di ‘younger brother’ and 阿妹 a me ‘younger sister’, where Mandarin doubles the syllable: 弟弟 dìdi, 妹妹 mèimei. The rest of the family is on the family words page.
• The same two characters, the other way round. To like is 欢喜 huoe shi in Shanghainese and 喜欢 xǐhuan in Mandarin.
• 啥 builds the question words. 啥 sa ‘what’ is inside 啥人 sa nyin ‘who’, literally what person, where Mandarin has an unrelated word, 谁 shéi. The whole set is on the question words page.
• 头 where Mandarin has 子. A nose is 鼻头 bih deu, against Mandarin 鼻子 bízi. It is a tendency and not a rule: a table is 台子 de tsy, with 子.

How common are these words?

Very. In the 4.2 hours of recorded Shanghainese conversation behind Verbavia’s frequency list, twenty speakers said 侬 non 1,075 times, 讲 kaon 876 times, 伊 yi 812 times, 阿拉 a la 507 times and 侪 ze 463 times. Seven of the fifty are among the forty commonest words in the whole list.

The Mandarin words beside them were almost absent from the same recordings: 你 nǐ, 他 tā, 什么 shénme, 知道 zhīdào and 东西 dōngxi were not written down once. Which Shanghainese words are holding and which are giving way is counted on the page about words that survive and words that faded.

What this list is not

It is not most of the vocabulary. Most words are shared: 人 nyin ‘person’, 水 syu ‘water’ and thousands of others are written with the same characters and mean the same thing, and differ only in sound. The words that differ are a minority, but they are the words in nearly every sentence, which is why a Mandarin speaker who has never studied Shanghainese cannot follow it. The sounds, the tones and the grammar are compared on the main Shanghainese vs Mandarin page, and what a Mandarin speaker can carry over is on Shanghainese for Mandarin speakers.

How to learn them

• Learn the Shanghainese word as a word. If you know Mandarin, the temptation is to say the Mandarin word with Shanghainese sounds. That produces something no one says.
• Start with the first two groups. The pronouns and the small words are in almost every sentence, so they repay the effort first.
• Listen to each pair. The recordings above are there so that the difference is in your ear and not only on the page.

The free Shanghainese course teaches all fifty, in sentences, and the most common Shanghainese words are listed with pronunciation and recordings.

Sources

1. Verbavia (2026). Shanghainese Word Frequency, v1: counts from 4.19 hours of recorded conversation (MagicData) and written Wu. CC0.
2. CC-CEDICT: the Mandarin words and their pinyin.
3. Wikipedia: Shanghainese — pronouns and vocabulary.