Ningbonese Study Resources

Ningbonese Study Resources

The resources for available for Wu Chinese varieties in general are very limited compared to other large language groups, and most of the resources are targeted at Chinese speakers, not English speakers.

General resources

The Wu Chinese Society (wu-chinese.com) has put together an excellent website with dictionaries, a forum for discussion, and a guide to romanization. Though there are many romanization schemes for Wu; the one used by the Wu Chinese Society is Tongyong Wuyu Pinyin (通用吴语拼音).

• Tongyong Wuyu Pinyin for Ningbonese
• Character dictionary for Ningbonese

Another group is 吴语学堂, for which there are two sites: www.wugniu.com and www.goetian.net. These seem to be relatively new, somewhat grassroots sites.

Books

There are a number of good Chinese books for learning Ningbonese, but they may be hard to obtain outside of China, such as:

• 《贾军教你说宁波话》
• 《宁波话大课堂》
• 《周志锋解说宁波话》

Audio

There are some audio resources available on Ximalaya FM, the podcast and audio show platform:

• Ximalaya 跟着Tina学说宁波话
• Ximalaya 跟着崔姥姥学宁波话

Video

The biggest YouTube channel that has resources for Wu Chinese is  吳儂軟語 Wu Chinese. You may also have great look finding videos on the many Chinese-language video sites, e.g. Bilibili.

Wikipedia

There is a Wu Chinese edition of Wikipedia. Due to the relatively non-standardized and non-unified nature of Wu Chinese, there is a usage guide for editors, which is fairly useful. The article 吴语 from the Chinese Wikipedia is also well-written.