User Comments - julen

Posted on: Haggling Like a Local

Hi Jason! We had already a long discussion on Kellen's site about this. Many of the things we said are probably irrelevant for a language learning site like this, as you are not necessarily concerned with historical and other aspects. But here is one point that I think IS important for the objective of this blog:

For people who are already learning mandarin, it is much easier to remember sentences in Shanghainese if you can relate them to mandarin characters, as the majority of words/expressions have a direct equivalent. This is the main reason why I found this lesson frustrating, because I found it too difficult to memorize without the proper character support.

Posted on: Haggling Like a Local

I agree with tanglang. I was very surprised to see Chinesepod using these random characters to represent the sounds of Shanghainese.

It is obvious that 便宜 or 一百 is always 便宜 or 一百, whether you pronounce it in Cantonese, Shanghainese or Hunanese. In fact, the pronunciation of these characters as we know them today in mandarin is not necessarily the most correct ones from a historical point of view, in many cases the original pronunciations may have been closer to some present day dialects.

Sure enough, Shanghainese is a new language that combines various Wu dialects, so there is little written material in Shanghainese proper. But there is abundant literature written in Wu, and it obviously used the characters in their proper sense. To ignore this is to ignore the importance of characters in the culture and language of all Chinese - including the Wu speakers.