you’re walking too fast
slow down so i can keep up
you’re walking beside me now
so we might as well hold hands
and since we’re holding hands
we might as well skip
since we’re skipping and holding hands
now we gotta sing!
–
About this poem
Recently, a friend and I talked about how kids (ourselves and all kids) need that cozy, fun feeling from their parents. We talked about adding holding hands with her daughter into their morning routine. She tried it, and that transformed everything!
Well, I won the song battle with my students. I learned Someday by IU, I’m the Best by 2NE1, and Love in the Milky Way by 10cm.
But, they didn’t have time to do it. The three of them, fifth and sixth graders, they were staying up until midnight to complete their ‘vacation homework’. After their rounds studying flute, piano. calligraphy, abacus, science, math and more, they were exhausted. During that week, for the first time ever, I saw these students struggling to keep their eyes open in class.
So, I didn’t have the heart to extract my payment of pizza from them, if they failed to learn the three songs they chose: Lemon Tree (done), You Are My Sunshine (done), Puff the Magic Dragon (fail).
Think it’s easy? Try singing along with this one: Someday by IU. (It’s the easiest of the three.)
It took me roughly 100-200 listens to get each song down, plus lots of writing down the pronunciation so I could do it. Then, it took multiple tries to get a song down, as I recorded my singing track on top of the original using the free audio program, Audacity.
My students recommended this song for me to learn. In fact, I signed a contract. I have to learn two Korean songs by September 1, or I think I have to go to prison, but first throw them a pizza party. My students (just two in this class), agreed to learn four English songs or buy me pizza. (I don’t want to talk about my poor negotiating skils!)
This song is a big change from k-pop songs and anything else I’ve heard here.
I like a lot of things about it: they’re playing a djembe drum with the adinkra symbol that I have hanging in my apartment (art done by a young kid in Ghana), their sound is reminiscent of sounds I grew up with of my dad’s singing and harmonica, and my brother’s bands.
And the lyrics are light and engaging, easy enough to understand with some poetic imagery to make it bigger and fun. Oh, I’m not a big fan of analyzing music. If you have a few minutes, just listen to it!
I started a playlist on youtube to keep an easy list of the songs I’ve been checking into. I’m following leads from students, friends and websites, pursuing songs that I like the sound and others that are on my list because they’re helpful mainly for language learning. For most songs, I’ve been able to find a video version that has lyrics in Korean (hangul) and English. Pretty incredible resource!!!
I’ve already learned that the song “Americano” isn’t actually about someone that loves an American person. It’s about a guy that loves coffee, and how he likes to order it. haha
Many of the songs mix some English with the Korean, in the chorus and titles such as “Lonely”, “I’ll Be Back” and “Don’t Cry”.
There’s a lot more to language learning than individual words and grammar. The rhythm and melody of each language conveys a lot of the meaning. And the best way to get that down is to do a lot of listening. What better way than to find some songs you like and learn them? And be able to sing them with friends at the Noraebang (singing room)!
Last year I tried a couple times, but failed! We made progress on a couple songs only to find out that they were not available at the noraebangs. Other songs I tried were too fast or the vocabulary was too esoteric to understand!
So, I’m on a mission to find songs that are:
- in the noraebang (popular!)
- slow enough or lots of repetition — better for a beginner to learn
- common vocabulary and expressions
K-Pop first brings to mind boy or girl groups and electronic dance music, but there’s a lot more out there. Korea’s a big country so obviously, there are a lot of styles and personalities to explore …including some male and female ballad singers, jazz, rap, etc. You’ll see some of the same bands on the top of most lists: BoA, Big Bang, Wondergirls, 2NE1, 2PM, T-ara, Girls Generation, CNBlue and MissA:
Here are a couple sites that have some suggestions.
- this is a good intro with videos of one person’s favorite k-pop songs
2. The Grand Narrative – K-Pop songs with translations, videos with English subtitles, and grammar and culture commentary. Fun site to explore! James Turnbull, with help from his Korean wife, presents a fun, insightful analysis of several songs:
Work is pretty hectic, but I quickly relax on the half hour walk home. As I leave the main road and head into Samyang, I begin to smell the ocean ahead. Then, it’s a tiny 25m detour for me to walk along the ocean for the last 200 m, rather than the most direct way home. So, I head directly to the beach or a bit further along, walk along the ‘boardwalk’. It’s a concrete and stone path along the shore …is boardwalk the right nme?
As summer unfolds, the path is busier day by day (when it’s not rainy!) People gather in pairs or groups, with small picnics of kimbap and sometimes a little grill. Or packs of cooked meat and beer. Or couple sit side by side, chatting and looking out to the ocean. Dads chase toddlers, and little girls skip. It’s a great dose of health on my way home.
Last night, a friend and I had worked late preparing report cards. So it was midnight, when I made it to the boardwalk. As I passed a group of eight, they asked me to stop, sit and join them. With a few guitars, a ukelele, a small 2-drum set, they were sitting roughly in a circle with beer, water, fried chicken, and chips, in the center. It felt like that casual sing-around-the-campfire atmosphere.
So, from midnight to 1 am, I hung out with friendly Koreans from Jeju and others from the mainland of Korea (Daegu, Seoul and elsewhere). Music, the universal language, was a much more effective means of communication than their lack of English and my more drastic lack of Korean. Clapping, singing and enjoying.
I’m always stunned by the sweet centering power of things that happen in the moment, spontaneously, …like a sing-along on the boardwalk.
This week I tried adding in some songs with varying success:
My 5-year olds also taught me the motions to a new song: One Little Finger. It’s not exactly a hand jive but it took me a few times to learn it! Pretty awesome!
So, tonight we tried out the local Noraebang (Singing room) in our little town of Samyang. It’s pretty basic. For 10,000 won/$10 you rent a room for nominally one hour (but you always seem to get longer).
The microphones and acoustics are so bad in the room, it’s impossible to sound very good. And that’s actually liberating.
So whether they were songs we actually knew or those that you just think you can sing, it sounds pretty much the same.
Don’t Know Why (Norah Jones), Bohemian Rhapsody (Queen), Dios Le Pido (Juanes), Loner (CN Blue – Korean/English), Unchained Melody, Unbreak My Heart, Kiss Me, I’m Yours …and many many more! We sang our hearts out, and were completely exhausted. It was great!
At my new school there is a very well developed plan for which books you use for which classes. But I got a ‘bye’ to take the first day with each class to go off the curriculum and do a fun day.
I learned that one class had been studying comparatives (-er) and superlatives (-est). Aha! I have the perfect song for this…
Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Better (1950 Annie Get Your Gun)
My 13-year-old students loved it. “Can we learn this song?”
Soon, the four had been divided into two. Two students were ‘Annie’ and the other two were ‘Frank’.
The lyrics just beg to be said, yelled, whispered, or sung. It wasn’t long before the director heard a ruckus. She headed down the hall to check it out, then realized that it was us ‘singing’. hahaha good times!
Anything you can do,
I can do better.
I can do anything
Better than you.
No, you can’t.
Yes, I can. No, you can’t.
Yes, I can. No, you can’t.
Yes, I can,
Yes, I can!
Anything you can be
I can be greater.
Sooner or later,
I’m greater than you.
No, you’re not. Yes, I am.
No, you’re not. Yes, I am.
No, you’re NOT!. Yes, I am.
Yes, I am!
I can shoot a partridge
With a single cartridge.
I can get a sparrow
With a bow and arrow.
I can live on bread and cheese.
And only on that?
Yes.
So can a rat!
The rest of the lyrics are singable too, with competitions for who can sing longer, higher, softer, sweeter.
So funny. Okay maybe not for your mp3, but yeah, for English class.
Do we have singing rooms in the US? (Called Norae-bangs …norae – singing, bang /bong/ = room) This isn’t karaoke at a bar, it’s different. Friends get together and you pay for a singing room by the hour. You pay anywherefrom $10 to $30, depending on the size of the group and they usually give you two hours for the price of one hour. Then you hang out on cushioned seats or on the floor, you have tambourines, maybe stuffed animals or hats, a couple microphones, and a huge TV. You have books you can look thru for songs in Korean, English, Japanese, Indonesian, etc or you can use the computer and search by singer or song name. It’s ridiculously fun. Whether people are good singers or bad singers, it’s all fabulous!
Last night there were about ten of us to start with, singing everything from Spice Girls, Norah Jones, Beatles, Bon Jovi, Steppenwolf and lots of Korean and Indonesian songs. So great. This is my next business idea for the US…maybe
I’d heard of singing rooms, or Nori Bangs, but hadn’t experienced one. So, on our 10 am – 11 am break on Friday, four of us teachers walked out of work and then tried to figure out where to go. No one was particularly hungry. We were happy to be out for a break. My young American coworker suggested a singing room. Sure, I said. The other teachers: Korean and Canadian, said no thanks, and made a beeline the opposite direction.
So, the two of us headed into an arcade and opened the half-solid, half-clear plexiglass door and sat down, each on a bench next to a microphone.These aren’t ‘real singing rooms’, but they’re pretty nice for a couple people and a short time. Real singing rooms might have big red cushions in a large circle and stuffed animals (to hug?!).
It seems easy enough to look through the book, enter the song number and away we go, but that darn not being able to read slows you down. After maneuvering past a trivia game, and a few menus and controllers, we spent a whopping $1.40 to sing three songs. We somehow missed getting the right number in for one, but successfully (well, that’s a generous interpretation) belted out The Look (an 80′s rock ballad) and Fly Me to the Moon (Sinatra). So fun!
Without a crowd looking on, there’s not much to be embarrassed about. The music and your singing comes out in the room all around you, so you sound magically great. I hear that it’s common to see someone in the room just singing all by themself. It wouldn’t be any stranger than saying playing an arcade game alone.
…Which is what I used as my rationale when I stopped in there today when I had a few minutes. After enjoying a 1,000 krw ($0.90) roll of kimbap (think California roll but with ham, Korean noodle, cucumber inside, then rice, then seaweed and sesame seeds outside), I headed into the arcade. I felt a little weird but no one else seemed to notice. Without my seasoned coworker, it took me three tries to push the right buttons to actually get a song going in English. And, though it wasn’t what I meant to choose, it was fun and stress-relieving to sing John Lennon’s LOVE (Love is wanting to be loved. / Love is touch, touch is love, / Love is reaching, reaching love, / Love is asking to be loved.)
