Thursday, January 18, 2007

English Only

I remember hearing this "joke" awhile back...

Q: What do you call someone that can only speak one language?
A: An American

At work, a lot of people share their iTunes music on the network. One thing I've noticed is that all the songs are in English. Not only that, everyone has pretty much the same songs/artists. Maybe they all copied the MP3 files from each other.

Fortuately (or unfortunately), my first language was Mandarin Chinese and I learned English in Canada when I was young. Right now I have 5998 items (17 days/30 GB) in iTunes on my Mac and I counted songs in 10 languages. In addition to English and Mandarin, which are the only two I understand (about 70% for Mandarin), I have songs in Korean, Japanese, Cantonese, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and German (99 Luftballons!). I don't think you need to understand the lyrics to enjoy the music. In fact, a lot of American/British bands are really popular in Asia; I'm pretty sure most of their fans have no idea what all the lyrics mean.

The song at the top of on my current playlist is I'm Coming by Bi (Rain). He's currently on a world tour promoting a new album and was in Las Vegas during Christmas (cheapest tickets were $100).

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