Hey people! 🙂
Today, let’s listen to a song in Norwegian. I’ve known and liked it for a couple years now, definitely longer than I’ve been learning Norwegian. However, even now that I’m learning the language, whenever I’d listen to it I had a hard time understanding much. It’s generally a problem I have a lot in Norwegian – I feel pretty satisfied with the results of my learning overall and how it seems to progress quite quickly, but when it comes to listening, not even just music but also people speaking, anything other than your typical, posh-sounding Oslo Norwegian that most people think about when they think Norwegian, makes my brain lag and I really struggle to understand what people are saying, unless someone speaks REALLY slowly. – It frustrates me as shit because with the Oslo Norwegian I really don’t have much of a difficulty understanding it at all, unless I simply don’t know a word or phrase or something. – I comfort myself that natives experience this too to an extent with dialects that are a lot different than their own, but still, to me it happens quite a lot, and then if I am able to see the same thing in writing like a transcript or lyrics or something, I’m usually surprised how I could not understand it. 😀 And that sometimes makes me feel that perhaps I’m not making all that much progress at all, because even when I didn’t speak almost any Norwegian, only Swedish, I could still understand a decent amount of written Norwegian bokmål and people speaking “typical” Norwegian. So that’s what I decided to do with this song at some point – look up its lyrics to be able to see how much of it I’d be able to understand when reading. And I did, more or less, but it wasn’t as easy for me as it is most of the time, for some reason. I’m not even entirely sure why. So when I thought that I could share it with you, I was very happy to discover that there is a very decent-looking English translation of this song available here so I won’t have to write my own. 😀 Here it is:
It doesn’t bother me that you are the kind
That smiles while you’re crying
and that you always ask me why we two even exist at all
because you know I struggle
with the same thoughts as you
and more than that…Because you deserve someone like me
someone stranger than you are
and if you don’t know where to go
then at least we two are together stillIt doesn’t bother me that you get angry and crazy when you’re drunk
and that you scream that you will die before you get old and round
so long as we can run
till our feet fail, through all kinds of messBecause you deserve someone like me
someone stranger than you are
and if you don’t know where to go
then at least we two are together stillIt doesn’t bother me that we don’t make much money
or must live in a tiny room with a tiny bed
and if it all should come crashing down
I will partake in the absurdity that constitutes who we areBecause I can see how your head burns
How your hands shake
How your eyes water
but I know there is so much more to you
and you and I together we could lay a plan
and maybe we could make it workBecause you deserve someone like me
someone stranger than you are
and if you don’t know where to go
then at least we two are togetherBecause you deserve someone like me
someone stranger than you are
and if you don’t know where to go
then at least we two are together still
My Inner MishMash 