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Shanghai’s official language is Mandarin Chinese (putonghua). A notoriously difficult language to learn, it has no set alphabet and instead uses characters, a type of pictogram, which number at approximately 50,000. Luckily for Mandarin learners, not all are in everyday use and knowledge of about 3,000 should be enough to read a newspaper. Learning spoken Mandarin is made a little easier through the use of pinyin, a system that uses the Roman alphabet to represent the sounds in standard Mandarin pronunciation. Refrain, however, from breathing your sigh of relief, since spoken Chinese is a tonal language and, in itself, tricky to master. Each character is assigned one of five tones in the spoken form: first tone (high and level), second tone (rising from medium to high), third tone (starting low, dipping lower and then rising again), fourth tone (sharply falling from high to low) and the fifth neutral tone. Characters with the same pinyin ‘spelling’ have numerous meanings, each dependent on the particular tone used during pronunciation. A well-known but clear example of this potentially confusing aspect of spoken Chinese uses the word ‘ma’: pronounced with the first tone (mā) it means ‘mother’; with the second tone (má) it means ‘hemp’; with the third tone (mǎ) it means ‘horse’; with the fourth tone (mà) it means ‘to swear or reprimand’; and with the fifth tone (ma) it takes on the grammatical use of a question particle. A slip of the tonal tongue can, therefore, prove rather embarrassing.

In practice, the word on the city’s streets belongs to a far livelier local dialect: Shanghainese or Shanghaihua. Shanghaihua is derived from the Northern Wu dialect, one of 11 spoken across China. With no standardised written form, Shanghaihua exists only as an everyday spoken lingo and is hugely different in pronunciation to Mandarin. For a foreign student of Mandarin this can pose serious comprehension problems. Fortunately, however, Mandarin is the official language of teaching in schools and can be understood and spoken by the great majority of Shanghainese people. Regardless of whether they can understand or not, Chinese people greatly appreciate foreigners trying to learn the language and take such efforts as a sign of respect. Learning a few phrases is therefore a good way of ingratiating yourself with locals, particularly as many do not speak English.

In business or administrative situations where you need to negotiate with a Chinese person, it is, however, often advisable to stick to your native tongue from the beginning. Starting off with the few phrases in Mandarin that...