Say it the Shanghai way

Who it’s for

People who grew up hearing Shanghainese at home and want to say it back. Partners and children of Shanghainese families. Anyone who’s been told “have you eaten?” a thousand times and wants to answer.

How it works

The phrasebook comes first. Every phrase marked checked by a native speaker has been approved by a Shanghainese speaker from Shanghai — the words, the spelling and the pronunciation. When your phrase is in the book, that’s what you get: instantly, exactly as they approved it.

New phrases are drafted by AI, and say so. If nobody has verified your phrase yet, an AI drafts a Shanghainese version in a few seconds. It’s labelled not yet checked by a native speaker, because that’s the truth. Behind the scenes a stronger AI reviews the draft and a human reviewer decides whether it joins the phrasebook. Ask the same phrase later and you may find it’s been verified.

The audio is the point. Shanghainese is a spoken language; there’s no everyday standard for writing it. The characters are here so the voice knows what to say and so phrases stay consistent. The pronunciation guide underneath is looked up, character by character, in the 吳語學堂 (Wugniu) Shanghai dictionary, with a small tone number on the first syllable of each word — that is the syllable whose tone you can hear; the rest of the word follows it. Where the dictionary doesn’t cover a phrase yet, the guide is the AI’s guess with no tones, and says so. Either way the melody is in the audio. Press Play, or Play slow.

Say what you think. Every result has a thumbs up and down and a box for how you’d say it. Those go straight to the reviewer. The phrasebook grows from them.

What Shanghainese?

The target is contemporary urban Shanghainese as spoken by people aged roughly 30–55 today. Mandarin words that have become part of how Shanghai people actually talk are treated as correct, not as mistakes. Written forms follow one consistent convention (侬 阿拉 伊 勿 伐 搿 啥) so the voice and the book agree.

Under the hood, briefly

Drafts come from DeepSeek; a second AI (GLM) cross-checks them; the voice is Microsoft Azure’s Shanghainese speaker. All three are replaceable — the verified phrasebook is what matters.

The pronunciation data is the 吳語學堂 Shanghai dictionary (wugniu.com), which builds on the Rime Wu word list by 上海閒話abc and 吳語越音; both are GPL-3.0, and so are our corrections to them. Tones are worked out from the spelling with a public-domain table by Yuanhao Chen. Full credits and licence text: licences.

Questions, corrections, and especially phrases your grandmother says: use the feedback box on any result.