Chinese languages

I want to know the difference between shanghainese and mandarin. Is it a language different or is it mandarin with a few different words?

Please help.

Shanghainese and Mandarin are languages as different as English and German. Each has it's own peculiar set of words and both languages sound completely different.

cool, thanks.

Luke wrote:I want to know the difference between shanghainese and mandarin. Is it a language different or is it mandarin with a few different words?

Please help.

Even though they are different in sounds, they share the same writing.

Dylan Sung wrote:Shanghainese and Mandarin are languages as different as English and German. Each has it's own peculiar set of words and both languages sound completely different.

Woooo I would disagree with that. You're right in the sense that Shanghaihua does sound different to putonghua but a fair few of the pronounciations are very similar.

So, "I love you" in putonghua is "Wo ai ni". In Shanghaihua it would be "Wu ai nong". I know that a lot of the language is very different (in the same way a lot of oral cantonese is very different) but there are similarities in oral pronunciation and the written language is of course the same.

Even if a Shanghainese doesn't speak any putonghua, he can still communicate with a Mandarin-speaker through writing. However if a German wrote down Volksgemeinschaft or Schadenfreude or Bundestag the average English person won't have any idea of what's going on.


Taish.

Anonymous wrote:

Luke wrote:I want to know the difference between shanghainese and mandarin. Is it a language different or is it mandarin with a few different words?

Please help.

Even though they are different in sounds, they share the same writing.

This is WRONG. They are both usually written in Hanzi, yes, but their grammar is different. So, using "wuyubaihuawen" (as opposed to "putongbaihuawen"), there are some major differences.

Absolutely right ... The Hanzi argument, although made time and again, does not retain water. Whenever my wife needs to communicate with Japanese who do not speak any language we speak she uses hanzi - nobody's going to claim that makes Japanese a Chinese fangyan, right?

I do see, however, where the poster is coming from: German and English are indeed a bit too different, simply because English has absorbed so much Romance material that one cannot express anything without slipping in some Latin or French vocabulary that does not correspond to the German usage. French and Spanish might have been a better example.

The litmus test, finally, is whether a Mandarin-only speaker could communicate with a Shanghainese-only speaker without resorting to writing. I am absolutely sure he/ she could not. Which clearly makes the two of them separate languages, although both daughter languages of the same Middle Chinese as French and Spanish are descended from the same parent Latin.

Best regards,
Aurelio

-Different vocab. example: "we" in Mandarin would be "Wo men", in Shanghainese it would be "A la", which is written with different characters.

-Shanghainese has some SOV expressions, while Mandarin is mainly SVO (like most other Chinese dialects).

-Shanghainese lost all of it's tones, while Mandarin still has four.

-Shanghainese has voiced constants, Mandarin doesn't.

-Shanghainese has heavy tone sandhi, Mandarin doesn't.

So yeah, they're quite different.

Anonymous wrote:

Dylan Sung wrote:Shanghainese and Mandarin are languages as different as English and German. Each has it's own peculiar set of words and both languages sound completely different.

Woooo I would disagree with that. You're right in the sense that Shanghaihua does sound different to putonghua but a fair few of the pronounciations are very similar.

So, "I love you" in putonghua is "Wo ai ni". In Shanghaihua it would be "Wu ai nong". I know that a lot of the language is very different (in the same way a lot of oral cantonese is very different) but there are similarities in oral pronunciation

uh... just WHAT are you disagreeing with specifically?

Shanghainese is technically a DIFFERENT language from Mandarin.
Different grammar, different phonetic system, different vocabulary.

[wo ai ni] should be [(ng)u E noN] in Shanghainese.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Dylan Sung wrote:Shanghainese and Mandarin are languages as different as English and German. Each has it's own peculiar set of words and both languages sound completely different.

Woooo I would disagree with that. You're right in the sense that Shanghaihua does sound different to putonghua but a fair few of the pronounciations are very similar.

So, "I love you" in putonghua is "Wo ai ni". In Shanghaihua it would be "Wu ai nong". I know that a lot of the language is very different (in the same way a lot of oral cantonese is very different) but there are similarities in oral pronunciation

uh... just WHAT are you disagreeing with specifically?

Shanghainese is technically a DIFFERENT language from Mandarin.
Different grammar, different phonetic system, different vocabulary.

[wo ai ni] should be [(ng)u E noN] in Shanghainese.

it's the power of putonghua and chinese characters. It makes chinese write the same text, same characters and narrow the grammatical differenece between each dialects-----even if they can't orally understand each other.

And i guess that's why learners will draw an easy conclusion that: both are very similar.