Speaking mandarin in Shanghai
tommo176
April 15, 2012, 05:17 AM posted in General DiscussionHi I may be moving to Shanghai from Shenyang and am a little worried that Shanghai ren may not speak mandarin in general. I have heard that they speak shanghai hua ? Has any one got any opinions on this.
Tommo
jkdfj
April 15, 2012, 01:24 PMI actually think that a more common pronunciation issue that Shanghai people have is nasal sounds like : "sheng" or "zheng".
Basically, I haven't heard of any Chinese city that doesn't have a local dialect, including Beijing, but I think what makes Shanghai different is that the local dialect here is among the most difficult for Mandarin speakers to understand. It's different than mandarin in terms of tones, sounds, and even grammar !
Cantonese is known for being tough, but I think Shanghainese is far more difficult
chris
April 15, 2012, 06:16 AMHi tommo, whilst shanghainese is the local dialect, everyone I have ever come across here also speaks Mandarin. Younger people certainly speak it all the time (there are occasional press reports about people worrying shanghainese is spoken less and less by the younger generations). My only issue is that the Mandarin is generally not the standard mandarin we are lucky enough to enjoy on cpod - but then where is!! In particular, I find that in SH (and south china more generally for that matter) a lot of the zh, ch, and sh sounds morph into z, c and s.