considering that you are chinese, and speak cantonese rather then mando, don't you feel that even though you can speak canto and hold onto a canto conversation rather nicely, that sometimes when you listen to music that are sang into canto, that it's hard to hear everything and even get the meaning?
sometimes i have this problem, it's just cause the song went by too fast, or I wasn't paying too much attention to the song =O
Sometime I guess. But if I listen to the music at home, I would probably look at the lyrics as well. In case, I miss something...
i rarely understand the lyrics yet i try to memorize the song...they use complicated words...since its formal cause its writing and not speaking..
Ha i undertand most of the words they say, but if it just goes too quick i don't relli catch it. Anyway i listen to maderin music more and i don't understand it.
yeah it is sort of embarrasing, but hey, i grew up in america and still have no idea what most rappers/hip hoppers are talking about in their songs. i suppose that even though most of my friends are "fobs" im still a bit removed from the culture. alot of people that grew up in taiwan that im friends with still have no idea what jay chou sings in his faster songs!
yea i have the same problem with cantonese songs... sometimes it gets really depressing that i can't fully or even sometimes understand lil parts of the song. anybody got any tips on how to improve this ability to understand chinese songs??
It's not just a question of speed, but it's also that the words used in songs are different than what we'd use typically in conversation. For example, for a sentence in English like: "I went back home today," we would say in conversation, "Ngo gum yut fan hui nok kay," but in a song or more formal Cantonese, it would be, "Ngo gum teen wui liu ga" (我今天回了家.)
is definitely hard for me cos im English educated & dunno Mandarin... But i get to learn new stuff from all the Cantonese songs i've been listenin..
yeah..i sometimes have a hard time understanding the meaning of some songs.like recently, fiona sit song called mini sugar dumpling..i understand she is a robot, but what is the other all about..?
its poetic so im guessing most of us would have problems deciphering it. try chinese poems they are hard as hell even not put into music. im guessing american/english countries canto people would have some problems with this. You probably have to be a true fob to have no trouble listening. some songs its easy to pick up on the lyrics and others are a puzzle, depends on how good the writers are and your chinese is eh =P
For me, I don't have a problem understanding it. But I think ppl mostly don't get some words, cuz whenever they sing, they used written characters to sing than to speak. So then the words kind of change, but if you know how to speak the written characters, then you could understand it clearly and perfectly.
I guess Im not the only one with this problem. Yeah I agree that the reason behind this is the difference between the words used in formal writing and in a normal conversation. I took a chinese course before and the words used in the books were not words we would normally use in a conversation. A cantonese song is similar to those old school poems that you hear in ancient movies.
I feel that most of the singers now just plan suck becasue they can sing, so when we listen to the songs, we don't really want to listen to the words they sing out. Some singers also can't properly pronoun each word so it is very hard to understand their singing.
agree. sometimes in order to understand the lyrics, you have to study both formal and informal in order to understand it. sometimes it just takes practice to speak and listen. it may be better if you speak cantonese to your parents alot @ home also. another good way to comprend it is to also learn how to read and write chinese. then you can be able to pick up the lyrics and memorize it and understand them that way.^^
man.. cantonese (hk) music produce the crappiest lyrics nowadays. Sometimes they just sing to the tune.. even if the lyrics make no sense whatsoever. What ever happened to our golden days? =(
