OMG, I don’t understand what they’re saying~
Hey, guys! I’m back from Taiwan/Korea with a vengeance~
Have you ever traveled to a country so foreign to you that in order to find out if the place you’re looking at is a restaurant, you’ve had to walk all the way to the window to know? You should have seen me in Seoul looking for a place to eat then.
It’s not even like Korean culture is so foreign to me, after all 100% of my roommates have been Korean and a good chunk of my friends are Korean or interested in Korean culture… the thing is (I am actually writing this on my Korean Air flight to LA), I’ve never bothered to actually learn or understand Hangul outside your random Korean useful phrase- kamsamnida~ So what the heck am I doing listening to Wonder Girls if I can’t understand a thing? Not even when the hangul lyrics are on screen~
I agree with you 10.000%!!! If a voice or piece of music is truly beautiful, language is irrelevant. In fact, not exactly knowing a language can make the music that much more transcendent… you can literally paint meaning onto something if you don’t know what’s being said. The complexity of a voice can make lyrics almost superfluous.
@Camiele, music speaks louder than words. The quality of the voice has very little to do with what they’re saying, but how they say it. That’s why I love Bibi so much. xD
I have been trying to correct myself with English (correcting my Spanish seems a little bit impossible to me), but now my brain seems to shut off with English even with movies! LOL So sometimes I’m watching a movie, and my brain stops listening to the words and I have to re-focus to let it know that it’s okay to understand this time around. xD
@amy, HaHa. That’s officially the most awesome thing I’ve heard today… HaHa. I have that issue with Spanish.. knowing full well I know what’s being said, but my brain’s just like, “mmmmm…. shutting off now. Work.” But, yeah, it’s fine because the words themselves sometimes don’t even matter… it just SOUNDS good, you know what I mean?
I totally agree! I don’t even catch all the lyrics in my first language (English), so it’s always the sound of a song that appeals to me first.
You’d be surprised to find most people don’t think like us. I don’t know if it’s because of being in a bilingual house or something else, but a lot of people just can’t take their music in a foreign language they can’t speak. I will always remember that comment on Amazon saying that they liked the group, but they couldn’t take on a whole album that’s not in English. A little bit of foreign was okay, but not EVERYTHING. LOL
For me it’s all about the sound of the words. Sure, some songs are amazing because you understand what is being said and you can give the lyrics your own interpretation. I’m pretty sure I would’ve loved “Someone Like You” in any other language then just English. In that song there’s something about the melody and the way it’s being sung that kind of makes your heart ache.
As the linguistic nerd that I am, I love songs depending of how they tickle my ears, as in how the words are being pronounced. It’s always so great when you find a song that sounds great, then you go and find the translated lyrics and understand that the song also means something. But yet, I always find that the what the lyrics mean are of not that great importance to me.