Eurovision and Exploring Language
I’ve spent some time in Europe for the first time in my life and among the many new things like sipping espresso at cafes and learning how to use a bidet I also followed Eurovision. I’ll admit my ignorance up front: I figured it was part of the wave of reality singing competitions of the last couple decades. Maybe even spawned by American Idol. I apologize, Eurovision. In case you didn’t know, Eurovision has been a televised singing competition since the 1950’s. (Europe 1, My American Ignorance 0). With dozens of countries participating that means quite a few languages were represented. Given my nerdy language propensities I quickly saw endless opportunities for exploring language through Eurovision. I say “exploring” instead of “studying” purposefully. I didn’t create study plans where I diagrammed the grammar of song lyrics. Instead, I just listened to songs. But especially I watched the videos, because on YouTube subtitles are plentiful. I homed in on the songs in languages I’ve been exposed to the most or at the least language families: Romance and Slavic.
I’ve written before about how I use subtitles for language learning. But here I kept it simple. I initially just watched videos with subtitles in the language of the song. My understanding of the lyrics was spotty to say the least. Spanish is the only language I have a good command of, and besides that song lyrics have never been my forte (even in English I’m the kind of person who goes around singing Jimi Hendrix lyrics like “Excuse me while I kiss this guy!”). But I enjoyed many of the songs. And the more I watched the videos the more I appreciated them. Especially after I switched to some English subtitles; and then switched back to subtitles in the language of the song. I watched the videos as many times as I wanted, because in the end I was interested in enjoying music along with language.
For some songs like “Saudade, Saudade” there were lots of English lyrics which helped me to make sense of other lyrics. For that song I translated the Portuguese lyrics since there were so few and they’re so similar to Spanish.
Other songs such as “SloMo” playfully incorporated English helping me keep up with the lyrics of the song.
And for other songs such as “In corpore sano” from Serbia I simply followed as much as I could in Serbian and then as much as I could in Latin (yes, the songs feature LOTS of different languages).
While I began by wondering whether or not to translate the lyrics of each song, I soon realized I’d framed the situation wrong. A better question was simply how to appreciate the songs more. Certainly part of that is understanding more of the language in the lyrics. But I don’t have to understand lyrics perfectly to feel a song. And moreover this isn’t a test I’m trying to earn an A on. Therefore, in this situation I can “study” as little or as much as I’m inspired to. I think it’s an example of what I wrote about “leaning into your nerdiness” with language. Find something I love (music for example) then engage in that in the language I’m interested in… or in any language for that matter. Let my passion for the music inspire me in language.
So, does all this “count” as language learning? My fastest answer is “Who cares?”. I write a lot about making sense out of language. And that remains my primary goal with language. Making sense. But as I mentioned when I wrote about reading, sometimes people read for the experience not simply communication of, construction, and organization of facts. Nearly a century ago Lousie Rosenblatt argued that sometimes reading is more about an aesthetic experience than figuring out information. I think that becomes only more important with language that is sung. I was enjoying music, participating in a cultural event, and enjoying language along the way. I don’t need to officially “study” a language to pick up enough of it to appreciate music more. Perhaps sometimes I can simply allow myself to enjoy language for all the complexity and messiness and unclearness it brings across its infinite varieties and combinations. If this doesn’t count as language learning, then we need to reconsider why we’ve defined language learning in a way that excludes some of the most traditional uses of language humans have invented: song.
