This has a little to do with what we were talking about before...not a lot, but I thought maybe I would share this story of my confusion with all the South Slavic languages
Recently I was in Bulgaria and decided to listen to the radio - I like to do that in foreign countries cause I can listen to what's playing, plus it's fun to see how much I can understand of the news - and I found a station (Signal Plus? I don't remember exactly) that was playing something obviously not the usual W. hits [
cool, I am not sure if it was chowga; I remember everything you told me about it but am not sure I could recognize it again after hearing it just that once
] although it was definitely Slavic. And I could pick out some of the words - Bulgarian words - I don't remember them now but it was something about you not loving me and are doing something else, I love you but I'm going to leave, and I got excited and thought, sweet, now I know enough Bulgarian to listen to songs and know what they're talking about
Not that this is hard to do, though; about a year ago I started listening to compilations of "hit Russian songs" - Goryachaya Desyatka - (although with other Russ. songs) and for the most part the lyrics are SO SIMPLE: examples: "solnce ne solnce, leto ne leto, esli so mnoiu tebya ryadom netu, more ne more, pesnya ne pesnya ah ah" ("the sun's not the sun, the summer's not the summer, if you're not beside me; the sea's not the sea, the song's not the song, ah ah"
. Also typical: "perepishu liubov' i novyi den' nochnu ya bez tebya; ne povtvoritsia vnov' so mnoi istoriya moya" and "ty poceluesh' no ne liubish' no ne liubish'" and "ya za tebia umru" (I rewrite my love and start a new day without you; my story won't repeat itself again with me," "you'll kiss but you don't love, don't love," "I'll die for you"). If you know about 10 key words - or even less, just "I," "me," "you," and "love," you'll get at least half of most songs...ha ha, I used to think that writing Russian lyrics like that was easy and fun and wrote little poems: "dnem o tebe ya mectaiu, nochiu ty snish'sya mne" (I dream about you during the day, at night I see you in my sleep) before I realized that it was authentic but total crap
But seriously, I remember watching MTV Russia when I was in Moscow and seeing a clip where the lyrics were (I swear I am not making this up; I remembered them because they were sooooo bad): "ya ne znaiu pocemu v ponedel'nik ya ne p'iu, v sredu ya sovsem ne spliu ya pyatnicu liubliu" (I don't know why on Monday I don't drink, on Wednesday I don't sleep at all, I love Fridays). So with lyrics like that it is usually not hard to figure out what songs mean even if you have only been studying a language for a short time
Anyway, I was listening to this song in Bulgarian and could sort of understand it, and then another song came on where I couldn't pick out any words, and then another - and I kind of stopped listening for a while - and then I heard "volish, volish" and thought
WAIT...that can't be Bulgarian...because "volish" sounds only like "volja," a little, so it must be Serbian or something; I AM going to get confused
So I stopped listening to Balkan "chowga" and found another station, which I think was BG National Radio (they said something like "only" - or "all" - Bulgarian music, along with the station name), so I could listen to something that wouldn't mess me up more than necessary
I suppose another fun game to play, rather than "guess the lyrics," might have been "guess the language," although I am not that good yet - I can hear that it's Slavic, but that's about it, unless it uses one of the < 50 Bulgarian words I know...other than that...I'm lost
It was fun listening to the radio and hearing songs like "Obiche me" ("love me") though
