I noticed some surprising things as I was learning the lyrics to Konayuki. Usually, when I’m learning a song, the chords are the most difficult part—lyrics are memorized easily. But when the lyrics are in another language, that dynamic changes considerably. The only difficult part in the chords is a change from D to B minor—other than that, I can play along with the mp3 at full tempo. But the lyrics, this time, are a little more of a challenge.
I experimented with a few different forms. The chords I found online had the lyrics in romaji—for example, “konayuki mau kisetsu wa itsumo sure chigai”. I also tried putting them in hiragana—”こなゆきまうきせつはいつもすれちがい” for the same phrase. But it turned out that the easiest way for me to read the lyrics fluently was using kanji—粉雪舞う季節はいつもすれ違い—albeit with furigana (very small hiragana above each character). In this form I found the text very easy to read and understand—and keep in the correct rhythm.
When singing in any language, there are natural places to extend certain syllables or compress others in order to accomodate the melodic flow of the notes. When singing in your native language, you don’t even notice when you do this—it’s simply a natural extension of speaking, even if you would never actually speak that way. But when singing in another language, you often find that they compress or extend in places that seem strange to you.
The one that always gets me in Japanese is the dipthong “ai” (like in the English word “ice”). If, for example, I have four notes, but the Japanese text says “naikedo”, I imagine I have to extend one of the syllables, since there are only three syllables, right? Wrong—Japanese breaks up the dipthong into two syllables: “na” and “i” (rhyming with the English “pa” and “he”, respectively). This sequence occurs several times throughout the song (with, confusingly enough, the same sound being compressed into a single syllable elsewhere, when necessary), and I almost always got it wrong. But strangely enough, when I abandoned the romaji, it became much easier and natural to find the correct moments to pause and continue.
The final anecdote from my song-learning experience concerns a word in katakana. When katakana is used, it almost always represents a borrowed word—most frequently, from English. The particular word in the song was “a-su-fa-ru-to”, and in the song, accented on the second syllable. Normally, after understanding some basics of how English words get transformed into Japanese, it’s pretty easy to figure out a word based on the katakana. But for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out what this was supposed to mean. Finally, after singing through the song several times, I gave up and checked the dictionary. Turns out it was the emphasis throwing me off—the English word is “asphalt”, and if I’d simply emphasized the first and third syllables instead of the second, I would have got it instantly!
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