Learning Italian Through Song

There are many ways to learn a foreign language – some of them are harder than others, and certainly some are more fun than others. As someone who can remember the lyrics to countless 80s songs but not verb conjugations, I can totally get into the idea of learning a language through song.

As I’ve mentioned, the husband and I have been collecting Italian pop CDs for awhile. We especially love singers who enunciate their words enough for us to hear them (even if we don’t always understand them), and those who put the lyrics on the CD sleeves. Occasionally we’ve taken the time to translate songs, if only to get the gist of a favorite one or two. This produced funny results once when I translated a song I just liked because of its melody, and it turned out to be quite sexual, indeed…

Here are a couple translations for Italian pop songs on a blog I found:

• Eri Piccola Così – A classic tale of boy meets girl, boy marries girl, girl leaves boy, boy slaps girl, girl shoots boy… You get the picture.
• I Bambini Fanno Oh – A story of youth lost. And something about hair on the tongue.

There are others on this same blog – they’re linked on the left-hand menu under “Song Lyrics” – in case you want to read more. They’re quite fun, and could lead to an expansion of my Italian CD collection…