Monday, August 29, 2005

Learning Chinese the fun way

So, as those of you who read my blog regularly know (hi mom, hi Helen), I've been listening to a lot of Chinese pop. Recently though I bought a CD, mostly out of curiousity. CD's here are much more lavishly packaged since as Edison pointed out, there's so much pirating that they have to make it really nice. Due to an agreement with one of my friends, I started translating the songs for her into English and I have to say that it's a really good way to learn Chinese. Because I'm lazy I'll try to listen to the song to find out what a character that I don't know sounds like and then just look up the pinyin. Which means that you improve your listening. Also, listening to a CD is much more fun than listening to dialogues from textbooks which means once you know what it means it gets sort of reinforced every time you listen to it. Also you pick up some odd and sometimes useful vocabulary.

jiqiren-robot
sha-stupid
feng- crazy
dizhonghai-Mediterranean Ocean
zhentou-pillow
wangjiwanglou-Internet
guangdieji-CD-Rom player
bale-guava
caishichang-vegetable market

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

what cd are you translating? JJ? Zhang Zhenyue?

lovelesscynic said...

JJ. Although if you have more suggestions, please send them along, I've found most of them to be pretty good thus far. Just no Jolin, please.

Anonymous said...

Clara 真上進!
加油囉~

Anonymous said...

喜歡R&B的話可以聽 : 范逸臣, 溫嵐,

個人喜歡 : 周蕙, 范瑋琪, 江蕙(taiwanese)

-Michelle

lovelesscynic said...

Thanks for the suggestions Michelle. It's sort of weird because on MTV the only things that are really played are men with some sort of piano accompaniment singing about how a woman left them, and occasionally Will Pan with some sort of odd rap video, and then women usually singing about how a man left them. Maybe there's other stuff that they do that's not a hit single but I usually don't hear it, so it was interesting to buy a CD and realize, "Wow, there's a lot of different kinds of stuff on here."

Anonymous said...

sha, feng wow your blogger is so cool

Anonymous said...

have you heard the band F.I.R? I thought that they would be the most frequently played MTV....
either that or the annoying to the extreme song "脫掉" by 肚德偉 (wrong family name but i cant find the one with the 木 on the side)

-Michelle

lovelesscynic said...

I have seen F.I.R. but they must not have released anything recently because their music videos appear very rarely. Nor is that character Wu? Dewei. I don't think I've seen him.

Ironically the person who seems to dominate MTV is Andy Lau (Liu Dehua) same De as Dewei, hua as in Chinese person or huaren. They play a lot of Cindy Wang or Wang Xinling. Wang as in king, xin as in heart, I don't know the other character. Also Will Pan or Pan Weibo who just released a CD, so a lot of his songs also come up. Also of course 5566 and their horrible Riverdance video, and some of the other boy bands like K-One who has a video that's almost as bad featuring people dressed in animal costumes. Jolin Tsai is just omnipresent, I probably see her picture 5 times in 30 seconds as soon as I step out the door.

Surprisingly there's very little Jay Chou, despite him being the King of Pop.

Anonymous said...

張震嶽
MC Hotdog

you'll have loads of fun translating their stuff.