Beginner

• You should probably start with Mandarin Chinese first, but that’s just a recommendation.
• Find learning materials where you can learn the basics of Shanghainese in daily life.
• Follow the instructions from your resources and practice the pronunciation.
• Start with building your vocabulary, and be sure to learn basic vocabulary that you’ll use in daily life scenarios first.
• Repetition is very important at this stage: you need to review vocabulary constantly.
• Don’t be afraid to ask questions, if you don’t understand something, ASK SOMEONE
• Visit our “resources” section for Shanghainese and review each of the “beginner” resources
• Come join the Break Diving community and meet others pursuing this same dive!

Intermediate

• By the intermediate stage, you need to start understanding the differences between Chinese Mandarin and Shanghainese, and your tones should be fairly consistent and largely accurate. 
• Start mastering the grammar rules and try to apply them while you are speaking.
• Be brave and talk to some natives.  They can give you important feedback to help you to understand where you need to improve.
• Practice reading some books or news articles out loud in Shanghainese.
• Visit our “resources” section for Shanghainese and review each of the “intermediate” resources.
• Come join the Break Diving community and meet others pursuing this same dive!

Advanced

• By this stage, you should be very familiar with Shanghainese and should have no problems conversing with a Shanghai native.
• Your goal will be to continue building vocabulary.  Vocab, vocab, vocab.
• At this point, you should also learn some Shanghai culture -- that will help you to understand where some of the vocabularies come from.
• You should be able to read some articles in Shanghainese and understand the bigger picture.
• Visit our “resources” section for Shanghainese and review each of the “advanced” resources
• Come join the Break Diving community and meet others pursuing this same dive!