Published by 上海大学出版社, written by Yuàn Hénghuī 院恒辉 and coming with yet another diminutive audio CD which can’t be played on my slot-loading CD drive, “自学上海话” is a little red book of 184 pages long. I picked it up at the bookstore across the street from Cloud Nine mall. I figured my curiosity was worth 15元.

pros:
- close to standard use of IPA in the beginning pages¹
- detailed info on the tones and basics of tone sandhi
- useful phrases
- tones, thank God.

cons:
- abandonment of IPA after the introduction in favour of yet another janky pinyin system.

The abandonment of IPA is such a grave offence here simply for with what it has been replaced. Their pinyin needs some explanation. I can’t really type it out here in Unicode with any hope that it will show up even close to correctly on other systems, so instead visualise a series of dots and carons below some of the syllables. Bilabial plosives are written as b or p, but then since Shanghainese has voiced (e.g. [b]) as well as voiceless un-aspirated (e.g. [p]) initials in addition to the voiceless aspirated initials (e.g. [pʰ]), distinction must be made. So [pʰ] is written p, [p] as b as in pinyin, and [b] as b but with a black dot below the letter/character.

Open dots (e.g. 。) are drawn below words/characters that end in a glottal stop [ʔ], though this is redundant since they’re also written with a final -k, much like you see in Cantonese.

Finally a caron appears below two characters that are to be read as one with heavy elision. One of the first instances of this is 好 which is written here as 合噢, linked with a caron below. That 合噢 is their glyphic interpretation of [hɔ].².

The audio content on the CD is still unknown as I’ve packed away my one external CD drive and can’t quite remember where it’s ended up. When I can find it, I’ll post a clip.

Verdict:
Bear in mind it’s Mandarin only, in case the title hadn’t made that clear, so if you’re not comfortable with characters you may want to skip it. Otherwise if you’re trying to learn Shanghainese anyway and already have a handful of books, what’s 15 kuai to you? At the very least it offers a few different sentence patterns than books you may already own.

- – -
1. The book includes ɿ which I can let slide, but also includes E and A, both of which are unforgivable in 2009 when it was published.
2. The other common example of this in other books is [ŋu] 我 written as linked 嗯无

A lifestyle site for Shanghai, ShanghaiNing.com offers a good sampling of written Shanghainese. It’s a long-running site, up since at least 2002. The target audience is fairly focused and you’ll find no shortage of pics from the club and clips of topolect rap. But even if that’s not your cup of Jaegermeister, it’s still worth a look if you’re into how the general public writes Wu in Shanghai.

The tagline for the site is 侬白相啥?, which in Mandarin would be 你玩耍什么?. I’m up for a more fluid English translation than “What are you playing?” or “How are you playing around?” if anyone has any suggestions. And in case you missed it in earlier posts, this “ning” is the Wu pronunciation of 人, [ɲiɲ].

For another bit of the web embracing Wu, look to the name of one of the still-standing microblogging platforms operating in China, 做啥.

Super busy these days, but here’s a clip to let you know I’m still alive.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Today marks one year since the official launch of Annals of Wu. The site was set up in large part to help myself learn as much of the language as I could without formal (or even very directed) study, and I gotta say I’m not disappointed with the results. The comments have one more than one occasion yielded much more interesting directions than I might have been inclined to follow on my own. So thanks to everyone who has left comments and given me something to think about.

For the coming year expect more sound files, more instructional posts and possibly some branching out into other platforms. More on that last one later. I’ll also be adding a search function to the site which is much overdo.

In other news, some of you may have noticed the domain change. That’s part of a larger migration and upcoming project which isn’t quite ready yet. But when it is I think you’ll like it.

Big stuff planned for the year. Stay tuned.