One of the most challenging parts of learning a language is understanding songs in that language. In my early days of learning Spanish, I listened to the radio for hours daily. My favorite station was Radio Reloj. It was all news, read by commentators who spoke rapidly but clearly.
The first time I understood an entire news story was a personal landmark. When I tired of the news, I switched to music. I could usually catch bits and pieces of songs, an occasional phrase or chorus, but as a whole the songs often sounded like a collection of nonsense sounds.
Sometimes I misheard the lyrics. There was a hit by the Mexican group Maná called Oye, mi amor. The first part of the chorus goes: Oye, mi amor / No me digas que no / y vamos juntando las almas. Roughly: Listen my love / Don’t tell me no / and we’ll join together our souls.
What I heard—and sometimes sang—was: Oye mi amor / No me te castiga / Y vamos juntados hasta el mar, which doesn’t translate into anything logical, but to me it meant: Listen my love / Don’t punish me / and we’ll go together into the sea.
Likewise, Shakira had an early blockbuster called Pies Descalzos, Sueños Blancos that I loved, even though she sang so fast it was incomprehensible to my ears. The literal translation is Bare Feet, White Dreams. To this day I crank it up when it comes on, even though I’m still unsure of what she’s singing.
If the song is good enough, lyrical comprehension may not matter. There is a song from the 1970s that I still hear on the radio here that takes this idea to the extreme. The name of the song is Prisencolinensinainciusol. The singer is Adriano Celentano, a major star in Italy for decades. Celentano was intrigued that English-language rock songs were popular in Italy even though most listeners couldn’t understand the words.
Working with a linguist, he composed a song that is 100% gibberish. He uses sounds common to English and, in a couple places, a word or two in English. Every time this song came on it drove me crazy. I could not figure out the language. I decided it was some obscure creole or Cajun dialect spoken by a few thousand people in remote swamplands.
When I finally found the title and the backstory, it reminded me of my early days in Costa Rica, digging the tunes even though the words were a mystery. Here is the song—catchy, danceable, and proof you don’t need to understand a song to enjoy it.
