Wode Bao Bei

This song is currently playing on repeat in my head, and that is not at all a bad thing--it's quite peaceful and lovely! We're learning it for Chinese class; next month there's a foreigners-singing-Chinese competition which we may or may not be entering, depending on how confident we're feeling and whether or not we can all be convinced to sing/play the guitar (Andrew) in front of an audience.

"Wode bao bei" means "My baby," if you were wondering.

Singing in Chinese is interesting; or, at least, singing this song in Chinese is interesting. Chinese is a tonal language, of course, but when you sing you have to hit the notes you're playing, which may or may not match up with the tones you're supposed to be saying to make the words make sense. I've been told that, typically, as a result of this tones don't matter when singing.

In this song, however, she follows the music about 60% of the time and the actual tones about 40% of the time, making the singing-slash-talking alternative acoustic style work, and making those English speakers attempting to sing with her work, too. Her fun little vocal plays are half stylistic and half tonal, meaning the tones marked on the pinyin version of her lyrics (no tones on my linked version, sorry) which I have are right about half the time. So that's fun.

Actually, though, it is: her music reminds me of Ingrid Michaelson, whom I love, and it's quite fun to be able to sing in another language, however poorly. And who knows, come next month maybe we'll even win something from it.

If nothing else, we will have won ourselves a nice little KTV song!