19/07/27 17:48:52.41 K5OKe7Oj0.net
英作文の練習のためでない、コミュニケーションのための雑談スレッドです。
英作文の練習として雑談がしたい人は Chat in English スレッドへ行ってください。
This thread is for chatting in English but not for practicing writing English.
Plese go to the "Chat in English" thread if you want to write something in English as a writing practice.
46:名無しさん＠英語勉強中
19/07/31 16:59:50.43 9IXCsdk/0.net
I've encountered some times people recommending using English songs for new
learners to learn English. Maybe it's a good idea, for they might get familiar
with English sounds, but I've never thought of the difficulty in understanding
English lyrics. There are some things that are counter intuitive. New learners
of English often think that normal conversations among neighbors and friends
are easier than English used in news programs. But I think conversations among
people, especially among teenagers can be very hard to understand.
It's good that I didn't dare to try to tackle English lyrics in my early stages
of learning English. I may have been discouraged by the difficulty of
understanding it.
47:名無しさん＠英語勉強中
19/07/31 17:35:49.52 j0maqqb80.net
>>46
Yes, it was a very good thing that you didn't tackle English songs or poems
in your earlier stages of English study. English songs and poems are
really hard for adult nonnatives, at least for Asians and other peoples
whose native languages are far from English and other Indo-European languages because:
(1) Poems and songs use "poetic license," that is, poets and songwriters sacrifice
logic and naturalness of phrasing in order to put the need for rhyming and rhythm first.
An ideal poem or song would be one written with logical correctness and natural phrasing
and yet with beautiful rhyming and rhythm. But that's not always easy. Poets and songwriters
often have to resort to unnatural phrasing, by using expressions and words never used in
everyday conversation or business world or anywhere else. They also sometimes have to
break some grammatical rules. That is precisely why English native speakers on English-study
forums keep asserting to us nonnnative learners of English that it's not a good idea to learn
correct English by reading or trying to understand poems or songs.
(to be continued)
48:名無しさん＠英語勉強中
19/07/31 17:36:07.65 j0maqqb80.net
(continued)
(2) Poems and songs are written with extreme succinctness. Songs, in particular, are typically
written in lengths short enough for people to finish singing within five or even three minutes.
But still, they are required to convey a lot of profound, complex feeling or idea or both.
Ideas and feelings required to be expressed in such songs are very often -- or even at all times --
even more complex than the same length of text in a novel or nonfiction or newspaper article or other
fact-based writing. Poets and songwriters therefore typically have to make intellectual and intuitional
acrobats to express any one idea or feeling, trying to condense a tremendously heavy feeling or idea
in an extremely small number of words, which are nevertheless supposed to be written in a language
that should at least on the surface sound as if easy enough to be understood by teenagers.
They should never sound like a pholosophical work or an academic paper. And, most important of all,
these pieces of writing must definitely be artistically beautiful, even reaching the point where they
make the readers and listeners cry.
That is, I think, poems and songs are far, far more difficult not only to write but also to appreciate.
No wonder I had never managed to appreciate any poem or song fully, whether in Japanese or English,
untill only several years ago, even though by then I had read numerous novels, nonfiction books,
and even some books on philosophy, psychology, and other areas.