Naus shares the knowledge on Shanghai dialect (SHH) in John's thread on the word hunting in Mandarin: Naus said dalie sounds retarded to Shanghainese speakers... veyr interesting. Why/how does it sound retarded. Because the term in Mandarin is usually learned along with the writing, it underscores the point that hunting is two morphemes "da" and "lie" in Chinese, weird in that it sounds like a phrase rather than a word. In Shanghainese because the term is often learned before writing, it registers as ONE WORD to native Shanghainese speakers, the second character has no independent meaning in Shanghainese. You also said that to this day you have trouble connecting connecting the Mandarin term to the concept. That's also very interesting. Could you explain/expand? Is this true all words or just words that you don't usually say in Mandarin? Yes, it ususally applies to words that are not commonly spoken or heard in Mandarin, but were learned in Shanghainese at an early age. Mandarin vocabulary must be associated, I suppose, with different realms from Shanghainese vocabulary. So are there any words in Shanghainese that sound retarded because they are more natural in Mandarin? There are of course. Like 恋爱 (lian'ai, love) would sound quite awkward if pronounced in Shanghainese (hence this word is almost ALWAYS pronounced in Mandarin in a Shanghainese conversation). But that is only because the term 恋爱 doesn't really exist in Shanghainese. Mandarin has a way to make every word sound "Mandarin" even if it's completely new or gibberish. Shanghainese is much harder because it has more tone sandhi, there is more tendency in Shanghainese for words rather than characters to register as single units. Like "stoplight" ("honglvdeng" doesn't register in Shanghainese at all as red-green-light but simply "stoplight", the tones in Shanghainese are different between red-green-light and stoplight). This means nearly all newly coined Mandarin words do not easily develop a Shanghainese equivalent, while Mandarin is able to create all kinds of vocabulary simply by artificial construction. But some of those constructions are a little too detached (like dalie) and becomes a vague phrase to Shanghainese ears. To summarize, Shanghainese functions in an aural way with little thought to the individual characters (more like Western languages), while Mandarin is more literary and tends to revolve around characters and their compounds. I had heard similar things about the oral nature of Cantonese. I recommend reading the entire conversation, there are more comments worth reading. Tonight I'm considering attending a performance of Shanghainese opera, 沪剧.