| >>>i heard different versions from my friends concerning the tone of shanghainese. One told me it's tone free.... while others complained in my face how shanghainese tones vary all over the place, and they are a hell lot more complicated than manderin, more like cantonese. <<< Shanghainese tones are nothing like Cantonese. Cantonese tones are really rigid; you memorize the tone (of possible 9) of the Chinese character and that's it. Whenever that character needs to be pronounced, you pronounce it with that tone. There is a little tone sandhi, but nothing compared to the extent in Shanghainese. The few tones that Shanghainese has ends up morphing, overlapping, neutralizing all the time depending on the word. Although Shanghainese technically has 5 tones, there are actually only 2 live contrasts in Shanghainese. The other three tones are incorporated into the structure of the syllable. For example, syllables with voiced consonants (that is: b-,d-,g-,r-,z-,shj-,gn-) will always have the exact same tone. Think about the pitches in English: (t-d) table and desk; (p-b) pea and bee; (k-g) kee and geat. These pitch contrasts are very similar in Shanghainese. The other two "inherent" tones are due to Rusheng (short syllables with glottal stops). One Shanghainese Rusheng vowel is very similar to the "i" in English words: itch, ship, or disk (disk has a voiced consonant, which in Shanghainese makes it technically considered another tone, making 3 inherent tones total). BTW, a non-Rusheng, long "i" sound would be: eat, sheep, deep. The two ACTUAL live Shanghainese tones (independent of syllable structure) are somewhat close to the Mandarin flat tone (1) and the Mandarin down tone (4). So compared to Mandarin, Shanghainese has two to three less tones; and compared to Cantonese, Shanghainese has 4 to 7 less tones. This should make life easier for those Westerners who only care to be understood in China. Some of your friends however had also commented that Shanghainese tones are really hard. What they mean is that it is really hard for non-native speakers to apply the tones that they learned or know when to use them or modify them. In fact the Shanghainese tones they learn from single (stand-alone) Chinese characters are essentially useless in spoken Shanghainese. This is because Shanghainese has a very strong tendency to NEUTRALIZE its tones (combine the two live tones to one) for every syllable after the first syllable of each word or idiom. The problem is that this neutralization (tone sandhi) is not entirely systematic for all words, and as a Mandarin speaker you do not know what the boundaries for these "words" are as Chinese characters are monosyllabic and have no spacing. What makes Shanghainese tones (or lack of) difficult is that you have to learn the pronounciation of WORDS and *not* CHARACTERS. There are a lot more polysyllabic words than Chinese characters. This makes learning Shanghainese for native-Mandarin/Cantonese speakers a lot harder than many other dialects. As hard as a full blown language. For Cantonese, I could just sit down and memorize 3000 characters and their proper pronounciation plus tone; I could basically pick up a dictionary and pronounce the words very accurately by having tone marks on the Romanization. The same for Mandarin. Once you know pinyin, you can pronounce nearly all Mandarin words when given pinyin. In Shanghainese, a non-native speaker will ALWAYS have an accent, because it is impossible to systematically mark the wide range of tone sandhi and neutralization. Shanghainese having only two tones and being extremely laxed even in those two actually makes it much harder to pronounce accurately. If you want to pronounce Shanghainese with as less accent as possible, you have to practice pronouncing and hearing each WORD. Transcribing pronounciations from one dialect to another, will not work; simply knowing the characters and their stand-alone Shanghainese pronounciation is not enough at all. In this sense, Shanghainese is very much like learning English. You have a hint at how a word or phrase is pronounced, but you don't really know until some native speaker pronounces it. And it's hard mimicking that pronounciation because there are SO many subtleties, exceptions, and idiosyncracies that you can only learn through experience and time.. Mandarin and Cantonese are indeed easy to pronounce with less accent compared to Shanghainese and English. Standard Mandarin with its 4+1 tone marks pretty much tell you exactly what is required. Very rigid, very systematic. Master the four tones, plus the consonant-vowel combinations, and you are set. Cantonese is also very rigid in tones, but is a little harder since it has more of these tones (6 to 9), you have to develop the ear for it. But Shanghainese is much harder than both simply because its tonal system is not rigid, nor is it practically quantifiable. But the positive note is that you are more likely to be understood with bad Shanghainese than with bad Mandarin or Cantonese (more daily Shanghainese words are polysyllabic and tone-independent than any other Chinese dialect). The other problem though is that Shanghainese people don't like listening to bad Shanghainese, even though they understand it perfectly. Once they figure out you are not native-Shanghainese (usually from the first couple of words), they will speak Mandarin to you. Which doesn't help you at all in improving your Shanghainese. |
Mandarin or Shanghaiese?