It’s been a long long day. I have precious little time to get everything in order for my next visa before the current one expires. I was under the false impression that my health check would occur in Pudong at 2:00 this afternoon. I only realised it was in fact to happen in Changning, way way west of Pudong. This realisation occurred around 1pm as I arrived at the wrong place. Needless to say, I’ve spent much greater time on public transportation than off it today. Only at the end did I cave and use a taxi for anything other than time estimates.
Before the panic set in, before I even made it to Pudong, I was at 龍之夢. There’s a book store operated by Xinhua but not called Xinhua across Changning Road from the actual mall, within spitting distance of two different Starbuck’s. In the past they’ve had some decent but not great books on Shanghainese, but with what I thought was time to kill, I headed back. Their selection on Shanghainese materials has doubled to a grand total of 4 books, two of which are dictionaries. There were about the same with one major exception. One had IPA transcription next to the characters with tones for each one, and the other had some non-standard and difficult to figure out transliteration system, free of tones. So I bought the first one. At only 38RMB, I think it was well worth it. Here’s the link for the one I skipped.
I’ll get more on the dictionary later. I’d like to touch on the futility of learning Shanghainese for a moment. I had a decently long cab ride back from my health check during which the usual conversation topics were touched on (hey you speak chinese well (I don’t), shanghai is too big (he said), are black people in america decent people, etc.). We got to the topic of language as is the case with most conversations I have these days, and the book was still in my bag so I thought I’d give it a quick try. I showed it to him; he read while driving. He was rather amused and pointed at one entry, pronouncing it clearly in Shanghainese. Except it didn’t match what was written hardly at all. He said 夹 as jia though the book gave kA, the tones being a mismatch as well. The other words in the phrase were close enough, but that one difference is enough to bring things into question at least for me. Not wanting to lose the thread of the conversation, I shrugged it off. Only later did I learn he was from Chongming Dao, which while technically is Shanghai, doesn’t really speak Shanghainese. They speak Chongminghua, which is different enough to be considered a distinctly different dialect by most sources, places closer to the Wu dialects in the Nantong area.
Maybe calling this a point of futility is a bit strong. But it does hurt the motivation a bit when self-described Shanghairen aren’t quite hitting the Shanghaihua target I’d set up (stupidly) in my mind.
Very topical to hit on the black thing, I thought. Maybe he’s a reality t.v. fan.
I’m an intense fan of Chinese dialects and a bit of a China hand. I totally sympathize with your experience. Don’t get too down on yourself. I wouldn’t say that you “stupidly” set up a target of Shanghaihua for Shanghai residents–naturally if you want to learn the language you hope that people in the city where that language supposed comes from will speak it. But as you’ve certainly observed, in China as in America (I’m not sure if you’re from the US or not), or UK, etc. more and more, people in a given place aren’t necessarily from that place. Makes learning the “dialects” (fangyan) harder — and from a sociological standpoint, increases the use of Mandarin. Good luck. It’s not futile–there are surely many, many millions of native speakers of “pure” (non-Chongming) Shanghai hua.
In reality it’s really not going to stop me from learning. More than anything I think it’s somewhat comical that the guy says he’s not just a resident but a native of Shanghai, full out 上海人, which technically is true, from a political standpoint.
The actual result of this, more likely than not, is that I’ll see it as a more interesting challenge, when I’m actually able to function on some level in Shanghainese, that I be able to adapt to the appropriate nearby dialects.
Glad to have your comment. I hope to see more.
Your blog is great and I enjoy hearing about people’s experiences in China and learning (the various varities) of Chinese. The fluidity of dialects (we could have a whole conversation on that term, but I digress) is both fascinating and frustrating. Sometimes the locals don’t want to bother with hearing a foreigner practice their fangyan and revert immediately to Mandarin–or amusingly they don’t know the fangyan themselves. The diversity of fangyan is amazing: e.g. northern Jiangsu (Nanjing–just accented mandarin) and southern Jiangsu (a Wu dialect) are totally different. And then you get the problem of highly-dialect-influenced Mandarin which a foreigner can barely understand but the speaker things is pure comprehensible mandarin
We shall continue our conversation…(No time for another digression now but yes the political 上海人 vs. cultural/linguistic 上海人 is an interesting dichotomy)