VERBAVIA

Learn Shanghainese

上海闲话 · a free course from absolute beginner to C2 · one lesson a day

Shanghainese is spoken by millions of people in and around Shanghai and is not a dialect of Mandarin in any useful sense: the two are not mutually intelligible. It is also in trouble, having been kept out of schools and broadcasting for decades, and it is losing its youngest speakers. Very little material exists for learning it in English. This is a complete course in it, free, with every phrase recorded in a Shanghainese voice.

Start where the language actually starts

Start the free Shanghainese course

No account needed to begin. Your place is kept on this device, and an account keeps it if you change device.

What is hard about Shanghainese, and what this course does about it

The hard part is peculiar to this language: it is written with Mandarin's characters, so a sentence can look entirely ordinary and be a different language when read aloud. 我不知道 and 我勿晓得 are equally plausible on the page and only one of them is Shanghainese. So every word in this course carries a romanisation and a real Wu recording, and where a recording does not exist the app stays silent rather than handing the characters to a Mandarin voice — a confident reading in the wrong language is worse than no sound at all.

What the course covers

29grammar points in the core
312hand-written lessons
2,930words in the frequency list
3,963Shanghainese recordings

The syllabus is 382 numbered steps, and the first 312 of them have a lesson written by hand behind them — the explanation, the examples and the questions, not a template filled in. 29 of those steps are the grammar core: everything you need before the course turns to recombining it, which is the work that carries you from intermediate to C2.

The first 14 grammar points, in order

Straight from the course's own syllabus. Each gets its own lesson, and comes back in the reading and listening of later ones.

  1. Reading Shanghainese: characters, romanisation, and why tone needs no drilling
  2. Greetings: 侬好, 谢谢侬, 再会
  3. The pronouns: 侬, 我, 伊, 阿拉, 㑚, 伊拉
  4. Word order, and the copula 是
  5. The attributive particle 个, where Mandarin uses 的
  6. Saying no: 勿, and 呒没 for "not have"
  7. Yes/no questions with 伐 at the end
  8. Question words: 啥, 啥人, 啥地方, 啥辰光, 哪能, 为啥
  9. 老 and 交关: saying "very" and "a lot"
  10. 侪 before the verb: saying "all"
  11. Where things are: 垃拉, 勒海, 勒 and 里向
  12. The progressive: 勒海 before the verb
  13. Completing an action: 脱, 仔 and sentence-final 哉
  14. Having done it before: 过

How one lesson works

Around 20–30 minutes at the fullest setting. Three lengths to choose from, and a shorter one spreads each grammar point over more lessons rather than taking the support away.

  1. Review first. Every card that is due today comes back before anything new starts — all of them, with no cap, because a cap on reviews is a cap on what you remember.
  2. New words. A handful of new words, dealt straight down the frequency list from wherever you got to, each with its recording.
  3. The grammar. One point, explained in writing with worked examples and tables, before the questions that test it.
  4. Reading. A passage in Shanghainese in three parts, written from words you have already been taught, with comprehension questions.
  5. Listening. The same again for the ear, in three parts.
  6. Writing. From lesson 7, one task where you produce Shanghainese of your own and get it back marked.

The words, and the order they come in

The course's vocabulary is a frequency list 2,930 words long, and the deck deals it in rank order from word one — so the words you meet first are the ones standing between you and an ordinary sentence. You can read the top of that list without signing up: the most common Shanghainese words.

The course's words and phrases are recorded in a Shanghainese voice — 3,963 clips, counted on the server — and the listening section plays them as connected speech rather than as a word list.

Flashcards come in both directions and in both scripts, so you learn to read the characters and to produce them, not only to recognise a word.

Where a phrase has no Shanghainese recording, the app plays nothing at all. Your browser would read these characters in Mandarin — a different language, read confidently — and silence is the honest answer instead.

Ready when you are

Start the free Shanghainese course

The course is free. Without a subscription there is a five-second house ad before a lesson and you study one language at a time; Verbavia Premium removes both for $4 a month, with a 7-day trial. No advertising network and no tracking, either way.

Guides to Shanghainese

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