Every Friday in our Spanish classes, Jonathan and I have to try to decipher the words to a song in Spanish by a guy from Colombia.
It’s a listening and comprehension exercise.
For those of you who know Jonathan even remotely well, you already know that listening to a song over and over and over (seriously about 15 times) is as close to torture as it gets for him.
He’s been singing this song ever since.
I just thought I’d share it with you, so that if you hear him singing a song in “some weirder foreign language”, you’ll know what it is.
I’m a visual person. He’s strongly auditory.
He is much better at this activity than I am. I don’t think it would matter what language a song were in, he’d still be better at it than me.
Military operations of (at least) the last 50 years have actually used song repetition as a form of psychological warfare.
It’s so commonly understood as torture that there’s a Wikipedia article devoted entirely to the topic.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_in_psychological_operations
After reading that Wikipedia article, I think it’s important for me to say that I’m not, by any means, comparing our Spanish class to the atrocities committed upon others…
I’m just sayin’.
Jonathan
Reminds me of when I was a kid in the 1950’s.
My sister got a 45 RPM Harry Belafonti record and subjected my parents to the torture of listening to it over and over, ad nauseum.
Do you remember what songs were on it?
Yea…listening to my sister sing the same few songs by Jewel during road trips was torture for sure
Okay, I’m not sure you want to post this, but just so you know I’m reading/listening to posts and reacting, this is kind of a response.
Last night at the BB the couple that signed up is bi-lingual, first language Spanish (he’s more fluent in English than she is) So after BB they meet Deb G. and she asks “Habla Espanol?” and takes off in this conversation w/ them in Spanish.
I mean I thought I knew most everything about Debbie. Just goes to show you. Turns out Deb started speaking Spanish after she was at a resort town in Mexico for like three days and has just kept it up.
(I didn’t get all the details, because they were given in Spanish)
Also, I don’t know about the torture part, but I had fun typing this to the rhythm of the video.