90 Day Turkish Challenge - Day 5 - Turkish songs

Hello dear readers.

I love music. And I use it very often to learn another language. But I started recognizing that it is not always that useful.

When learning Swedish, I listen a lot to swedish bands and I decode their lyrics so I can listen to them while I am reading it. That worked perfectly fine with most bands. The same at learning English. But I tried the same with the turkish language and  I started having problems immediately.
On the one hand, there were great songs, but on the other hand, they had poetic lyrics. But what is the problem with poetic language?



It is the following: Poets and often songwriters try to fit their message in a certain pattern. In a rhyme scheme. To reach this goal they often remove unnecessary words. This is a great stylistic device called ellipsis but it is a big problem if you want to learn with the song. The goal I have when learning with songs is learning new words and assimilating the language structure. But how am I able to gain this goal when the structur is changed in favor of the rhyme scheme?

Well... the answer is that I have to choose another song. Or I have to ask a native speaker if he could help me.

But there is still hope: When a song is very difficult to work with, just try another one. When you are at an higher level and you feel quiet confident with the language, you can come back to the song you had problems with. You will recognize patterns and structures and words you allready know and It will be more easy to identify the message.

Working with stylistic devices can be interesting. But not at a beginner level. So If you are at a beginner or intermediate level, do not try to guess the patterns. It might be frustrating to you. But if you allready speak the language at a high level, you can do it! It will definetly help you understanding the language better.

Another problem I often had to deal with was the content of some songs. You do not need to know hundred different varieties of how to say "I love you", but many songs deal with the same (unecessary) topics. So if you really want to learn useful content, chose songs that deal with everyday topics. Note that this might only the case at a beginner level when one's goal is to learn vocabulary he can use imediately.

But as always! If you are interested in a certain content. Work with it! If it is hard to guess, never mind. If you want to know what it means, and if you want to work with exactly that song, do it. Those tips shall just help you not becomming frustrated when songs are difficult.

"Learn everything you can, anytime you can, from anyone you can; there will always come a time when you will be grateful you did."                                                                  - Sahra Caldwell

Thank you for reading,
Best Regards,
Alex.