Friday 6 August 2010

Multilingual-oke

On the Thursday before I left Japan I did what I'd been wanting to do for a while - socialise with my tai-chi teacher outside of the gym. He told me to meet him in the morning in the city and we'd go to karaoke. What I didn't realise was that we'd also be meeting other people from his tai-chi classes, most of whom are elderly Japanese ladies. There were a few younger people there as well, though, including a Korean girl and a Japanese girl who was born in Vietnam.

It meant that we were singing in four different languages - Japanese, English, Chinese and Korean. Although the majority was taken up by Japanese enka songs - enka being a kind of melodramatic 'oldies' style of song. They're really easy to sing along with because they all sound the same, but you have to be good at a kind of vocal flourish to do them well. Anyway, I recorded my tai chi teacher singing a song in Chinese. Enjoy:

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