上海话听不懂 Shànghǎihuà tīng bu dǒng — I Can't Understand Shanghainese

Dialects, and why your Mandarin is not the problem

The moment in this dialogue is one every learner in China has: you have worked for a year on Mandarin, you arrive somewhere, and two people in front of you are speaking something you cannot identify as related to it. Nothing has gone wrong with your study. What you are hearing is a different language. The word 方言 is conventionally translated dialect, and that translation is the source of the confusion. Chinese 方言 are not accents of Mandarin. Linguists generally count seven to ten major groups — Mandarin 官话, Wu 吴语 around Shanghai and Suzhou, Yue 粤语 which includes Cantonese, Min 闽语 including Hokkien and Taiwanese, Hakka 客家话, Xiang 湘语 in Hunan, Gan 赣语 in Jiangxi — and the distances between them are comparable to the distances among the Romance languages. A Shanghai speaker and a Guangzhou speaker have no mutual intelligibility whatsoever in their home speech. What holds it all together is the writing system, which is shared, and 普通话, which almost everybody now also speaks. 普通话 itself is a twentieth-century project, and a successful one. Based on the Beijing sound system, standardised in the 1950s along with simplified characters and pinyin, and pushed through schools and broadcasting, it has gone from a minority accomplishment to something over eighty per cent of the population can use. That is why you can learn one language and be understood from Harbin to Kunming, and it is a genuine achievement of language planning. It has also cost something, and Chinese people argue about the cost. Younger urban speakers in many cities are markedly less fluent in the local speech than their grandparents; schools taught in 普通话 and for a long period discouraged anything else; and Shanghainese in particular is often described as being at risk, with children who understand it but answer in Mandarin — which is exactly what 阿婆 describes. There are preservation efforts, local-language broadcasts, and periodic public arguments about whether promoting the standard has to mean losing the rest. Cantonese is the conspicuous exception to the decline, for reasons lesson 80 goes into. This course has no position on any of it; what a visitor needs is to understand what is being argued about. The practical advice is 阿婆's own, and it is good: 听得懂就够了. Nobody expects a foreigner to speak a 方言, and attempting one badly is not charming. But recognising which one you are hearing, knowing why you cannot follow it, and being able to say 我听不懂上海话，可以说普通话吗？ will get you a smile and an immediate switch. Learn a couple of words of the local speech — a greeting, a thank you — and use them once, warmly, and then go back to Mandarin.