Hey, Check Out This Language! — #2, Wenzhounese, the “Devil’s Language”(?)
For my first post in this “obscure language” series, I wrote about Sranan Tongo, a somewhat funny-looking relative of English. As I’ve mentioned before, one of my favorite language things has always been learning a new language that’s related to one I already know (e.g. Serbian/Slovak after Russian, Punjabi/Bengali after Hindi, creole languages in general etc. etc.) and seeing the similarities and differences. Things get particularly interesting when the “language I already know” is one of my native languages, like English, which has always made learning English creoles and Germanic languages a uniquely entertaining experience.
And since I have a couple of other native languages—Mandarin and (sort of) Shanghainese — English-like languages aren’t the only source of this kind of entertainment for me. For example, the next obscure language in this series, Wenzhounese, was super fun for me to dabble in as well.
A few months ago I did a piece on the Wu Chinese “dialect” group, and I definitely glossed over a few significant details. I treated the entire Wu group as one language (with more native speakers than French! 80 million of them!) and more or less equated “Wu” as a whole with the Shanghainese (sub)dialect that I’m most familiar with. To be fair, that’s how the Wikipedia page I was looking at classified things. But it was also not entirely accurate — not all varieties of Wu are actually mutually intelligible, and the biggest outlier of all is Wenzhounese, spoken at the far southern end of the Wu dialect zone around the coastal city of Wenzhou.
What’s So Special About Wenzhounese?
Within China, Wenzhounese is notorious for being especially hard to understand—which is really saying something, considering the wide variety of dialects in country. It’s even been claimed that Wenzhounese was used by the Chinese military for secret communications during World War Two and the Sino-Vietnamese War, similar to how the U.S. used Navajo code-talkers. There’s a Chinese saying that goes: 天不怕，地不怕，就怕溫州人說溫州話 (“Don’t fear Heaven, don’t fear Earth, just fear a person from Wenzhou speaking Wenzhounese”) — and sometimes the term 溫州話(Wenzhounese) in the saying is replaced by鬼话(“devil-language”). The Wall Street Journal even has a couple of articles about how hard Wenzhounese is.
A lot of the weirdness of Wenzhounese comes down to its geographical position — if you go further south from Wenzhou, you end up leaving the Wu dialect zone (~Zhejiang province) and entering the Min dialect zone (~Fujian province), home of such dialects as Hokkien/Taiwanese (Southern Min) and Fuzhou dialect (Eastern Min). Being at the border between two dialect groups has turned Wenzhounese into something that’s not quite like either.
Still, Wenzhounese is generally classified as being in the Wu group — in particular for phonological reasons, like the voiced-plosive thing I mentioned in my previous article on Shanghainese*. Also, apparently elderly people from Wenzhou and from the historical old city of Suzhou are able to have (stilted) conversations with each other in their respective dialects, which I guess counts for something.
(*Yes, I know Min also has voiced plosives, but their etymological origin is different.)
So there you have it — a famously difficult language, which is also closely related to languages I already know well. Wenzhounese absolutely fits the description of a language I would want to learn at least a little bit of— a lot like Surinamese Creole, really.
On the other hand, there are almost no materials to learn the language with.
How Did I Finally Manage To Learn Wenzhounese?
Shortly after I finished my previous article about Wu, I started scouring the internet for more information on other Wu dialects — not even to really learn them per se, but just to hear what they sounded like. Dialects from Suzhou and Ningbo were all fine and pretty interesting, but Wenzhounese gradually became the one I was most interested in finding out more about.
And as far I can tell, in the year 2017, there is exactly one and only one way to learn Wenzhounese systematically— the Glossika series.
As I’ve mentioned before, my language-study approach is generally pretty low-tech and low-cost (shhh). Glossika, on the hand, charges a significant sum for access to their product, so normally I wouldn’t have considered it and I would have looked for other alternatives instead. But because the language in question was so obscure, there was really no realistic alternative — after thinking it over for a whole week, I finally had to bite the bullet and pay up to get access to Glossika’s Wenzhounese course. And I think it was a great decision.
What is Glossika?
I haven’t really promoted a lot of language-learning products on this blog — partially because there haven’t been that many that I’ve been impressed with — but I’ve got to make an exception for Glossika. Holy crap, it’s good.
Glossika is a Taiwan-based company founded by the polyglot Michael Campbell — being located in Taiwan is part of the reason why it has great coverage of Chinese dialects, including Wenzhounese — and… well, I actually don’t know much more about the details of the method and its history, because I skipped past all the preface material in the book to get straight to learning the language right away.
But anyway, as far as I can tell, Glossika’s approach lines up pretty well with the “comprehensible input hypothesis” that I (somehow only) first heard of at LangFest in Montreal a few months back— basically, just expose yourself to a deluge of content (but in a comprehensible way) and comprehension and proficiency will come to you over time, even without formal grammar study.
The Glossika books outline a whole methodology and timeline according to which you’re supposed to use their materials, but I honestly ignored it all and just went at my own (maybe slightly too fast) pace. First of all, I wasn’t really trying to learn Wenzhounese — I just wanted to get a general feel for how it worked and what it sounded like. And secondly, because Wenzhounese is relatively closely related to Shanghainese, I figured I could probably get away with upping the tempo a little bit thanks to my prior knowledge. In the end, I made my way through three months’ worth of Wenzhounese material(i.e. the first volume of the three-volume course) in about two months.
How Did It Go?
First of all, a disclaimer — I haven’t really had a single conversation in Wenzhounese. Again, this is partly because that was never the aim to begin with, and furthermore, I just haven’t run into that many people from Wenzhou, ever. (More on that later.)
That said, learning/absorbing Wenzhounese with Glossika was one the most enjoyable, and also most low-stress and laid-back language-learning experiences I’ve ever had. I’d say part of that was due to the specific language, but a lot it was because of the method.
Basically, I just listened to audio files like this every day for two months:
And afterwards (or beforehand), I’d skim through the accompanying booklet to double-check what I heard. The fact that this was a Chinese — and specifically Wu — dialect allowed me to get away with a bit of indiscipline, and it might have taken a bit more effort otherwise.
I got so into this process that I would frequently find myself choosing to listen to the Glossika tapes instead of music! — during my commute, during exercise, while doing chores, etc. etc. This was also great because it let me keep the rest of my language-learning schedule more or less intact — I didn’t need to allocate extra time for Wenzhounese since most of my “study” was being done at times I wouldn’t otherwise be spending on languages anyway.
Is There Really *No* Other Material Besides Glossika?
In terms of material available from the internet, presented in a systemic manner which can be used to study Wenzhounese independently — yeah, probably.
On the other hand, I did manage to get my hands on some good reference material. (Although this was also much more difficult than it is for many other Chinese dialects.) First, through the libraries at Columbia, I got access to a book called 温州方言志 (Record of the Wenzhou Dialect) which included an overview of the history, grammar and vocabulary of the language. The grammatical overview wasn’t particularly detailed, but the vocabulary and pronunciation information was great, and included a huge index of all characters matching a given pronunciation in Wenzhounese:
(The above snippet shows that the syllable yi in Wenzhounese can correspond to any of the following in Mandarin: yi, ye, qian, yan, xian, chan, ran, xuan, qiang, zhuang, chang, shang, yang, xiang, jian, shan, jiang, she, xia, jia, jie. Unpredictable sound correspondences like this are a big reason why Wenzhounese is hard for other Chinese speakers to understand!)
I also found a couple of TV shows in Wenzhounese online: 百晓讲新闻 (Baixiao Talks About The News, also on Youtube) and 闲事婆和事佬 (Nosy Neighbor Lady and Busybody Guy(?), also on Youtube). Helpfully (and typically for most Chinese shows) both of these shows are mostly subtitled in Mandarin so I could follow along more easily. I only watched a couple episodes of these each, but it was nice to get some listening in with non-Glossika material for a change. The shows were also an interesting window into day-to-day life in a Tier 2 city like Wenzhou, which I don’t really know much about.
So… Is Wenzhounese Really The Hardest Chinese Dialect of All?
Yeah, about that… I really don’t think Wenzhounese is that hard, actually. I don’t have a scientific definition of “hard”, but based on what I’ve seen of Wenzhounese and what I know about other Chinese dialects, Wenzhounese is probably a bit easier than Hokkien (Taiwanese) and at most on par with Cantonese.
But maybe that’s because I already know another Wu dialect, and Wenzhounese would be harder for someone who only knew Mandarin? That’s possible. I definitely noticed some similarities in vocabulary, grammar, and (less often) pronunciation between Wenzhou and Shanghai dialects, and the overall intonation patterns of both languages feel pretty similar to me.
The grammar of the language is a bit different from Mandarin, but then again that’s the case for all dialects. I didn’t notice anything that seemed particularly complicated.
One thing is probably true though: the average Chinese-speaker is more likely to have a hard time understanding Wenzhounese than most other dialects, just because Wenzhounese has way fewer speakers (basically one medium-sized city and the surrounding countryside, for about 5 million people total). Taiwanese and Cantonese might be just as “hard,” but they also have way more native speakers to begin with.
Another reason Wenzhou in particular is singled out for having a hard language is probably the other thing Wenzhou is famous for — being an “entrepreneurial city” that produces lots of merchants and businesspeople, and which is a major source of Chinese emigrants abroad. That gives people from Wenzhou a disproportionately high notability at the national level, relative to their population, magnifying the peculiarities of their language.
For example, apparently 90% of Chinese immigrants in Italy are from Wenzhou. When I visited France with my family as a kid, every single Chinese restaurant we went to also turned out to be run by people from Wenzhou. (We were going to Chinese restaurants because some of our fellow travelers refused to eat non-Chinese food, even when in France. Yeah, I know.)
In fact, the only real-life Wenzhounese person I’ve spoken the language to was a Chinese-French guy I met at a language exchange event, who had grown up in Paris. (He was predictably shocked to hear me speak Wenzhounese, but we didn’t really have a full conversation in it.)
Anyway, after all that, I've decided to stop studying Wenzhounese for now, and most likely forever —but who knows, maybe I’ll have a reason to visit Wenzhou (or a European Chinatown) some day, which’ll give me some reason to brush up on it. I’ve already achieved my rather modest goal of just getting a feel for the language, and more importantly I’m going to try to use Glossika to learn a different language now, and doing two Glossika courses at once seems like a recipe for disaster. (You’ll find out what my next Glossika language is soon enough.)
And finally, to reiterate, you should definitely check out Glossika! They even have a 40% sale going on right now until November 12. (Also, use this referral link — https://ai.glossika.com/referral/kevsun1 — to get a $5 credit on your purchase! ) Before you decide to put in the investment, you can check out some of the audio samples for their various languages on Soundcloud. They also offer online courses which are free for a few languages (Manx/Welsh/Kurdish/various Chinese dialects), so you can try those out too, but they seem to move at a slower pace and also require you to have a live internet connection while using them, so I still prefer the full courses with downloadable ebooks and audio files.
Glossika also has some other cool stuff like this10-Language Chinese Character Dictionary. It’s a pretty good reference to have if you’re interested in Chinese or general East Asian linguistics:
