Interesting facts about the language

The most striking thing when you arrive in Shanghai is, of course, the script used to write this language: You see the wonderfully ornate characters everywhere – sometimes in an old-fashioned calligraphy version, sometimes in a modern computer font. If some of the characters weren't also written in English, you'd feel like you'd landed in a completely different world. We'd like to give you a brief introduction to Chinese writing and the dialect spoken in Shanghai.

Shanghainese is a dialect of Wu. Wu is one of the languages spoken in China alongside Mandarin (Standard Chinese). The Shanghai dialect is written in Chinese characters. All Chinese languages can look back on a long written tradition: For 3,000 years, Chinese languages have been written continuously in characters. Each character represents one (or more) syllable(s). In total, Chinese culture knows about 90,000 characters – but don't panic: Many of these 90,000 characters are no longer in use; they appear in older literary texts, and even many Chinese people have to look these characters up in a dictionary. If you take a closer look at a character, you will notice that each character is made up of several (individual) strokes – the radicals. In Chinese dictionaries, the characters are grouped and arranged according to these radicals. When writing each character, you must pay attention to the specific order in which the individual strokes are combined to form a character.

If you are learning a Chinese language, please do not make the mistake of trying to copy the characters. You will not achieve much success in writing them down by simply "drawing". Please try to actually write the characters instead of copying them. Chinese characters can be divided into six categories. On the one hand, there are pictograms that capture real-life phenomena in an image. Learners can remember these characters particularly well. Doesn't the character 人 remind you of a running stick figure? And that's right: it means person. The character 山, for example, represents a mountain. 田 means field in English. The second category is also helpful for learners, as ideograms make abstract ideas easy to visualize. The character 一, for example, stands for 1. If you put a second line over it, 二, it becomes 2. And what do you think the Chinese 3 looks like? That's right: 三. In addition to these two categories, there are also compound characters that create a new meaning. For example, if someone is so strong (力) that they can pull a plow (the character for strength is reminiscent of this implement) across a field (田), then they must be a true man (男). The character for man is therefore a combination of the two characters for strength and field. In addition to the three categories mentioned, Chinese also has characters that distinguish synonyms and characters that separate syllables with the same sound.

Most Chinese characters, however, are so-called phonograms (the sixth and final type of character). In a phonogram, one part of the character indicates its pronunciation; the second part contains information about its meaning. To make learning easier for you, the Shanghainese language course also includes the transliteration of the characters into Latin letters. This transliteration is also used in China as an official form of romanization and is called "Pinyin." The term "Chinese" is often used synonymously with "Mandarin." It should be remembered, however, that there are many different Chinese languages. Until the 1950s, many different languages were spoken in China, and there was no common language that everyone in this vast country could understand. As part of a reform of the Chinese script, the spread of Standard Chinese (also known as Mandarin; the Chinese themselves call the language Pǔtōnhuá) as a unified standard throughout China was encouraged and demanded.

880 million people in China and Taiwan now speak Mandarin Chinese, making it the most widely spoken language in the world. In Shanghai, however, people speak their city's dialect, Shanghainese, alongside Mandarin Chinese. This language is a dialect of Wu and is considered easier for Europeans to learn than Mandarin Chinese. To speak and understand Mandarin, you need to learn to distinguish and pronounce five different tones. To make yourself understood in the Shanghainese dialect, you only need to know and be able to speak two tones. The vocabulary in Shanghai is also different from that in Mandarin Chinese: you have to learn new words, especially when it comes to business terms. The table below shows a comparison between Mandarin Chinese, Cantonese, and Shanghainese.