As if learning Chinese wasn’t challenging enough, the poor, struggling student has to contend with countless unique dialects spoken across the vast nation of China. One of those dialects is Shanghainese.

Shanghainese, as you might guess, is the dialect spoken in and around Shanghai.

To help you learn a few words or Shanghainese, China Daily, the largest English-language newspaper in China, has produced a series of video lessons.

Although I haven’t learned much from these videos, I do find them highly entertaining — and slightly absurd. In fact, sometimes I wonder if the producer is playing a joke on us, or on whomever funded the project.

As of this writing, twenty video lessons are available for you to view. Themes range from “Who’s going to pick up the check” to “How to ask a girl out for coffee.”