Ricky Hsiao!! This might just be a fan blog post of Ricky Hsiao rather than a specific reflection on one of his songs, but I will try my best to stay focused. Let's start with a bit of background--Ricky Hsiao is a Taiwanese singer who is also blind. I mention his disability because I am Hard of Hearing and disabled as well, in fact, disability is my research
focus and one of ~things~. Confession time: I have listened to this song about three times a day for the last three weeks.
For my personal language learning process, I find music videos very helpful, especially since I have found many Taiwanese song music videos to be very cinematic. The cinematic nature of the music video, this one in particular, provide more context for the Taiwanese words I am still learning. The subtitles in this video are in Mandarin-Chinese (link here), so there's is a sort of duality when it comes to my language learning process when it comes to learning through music. On one hand, I am hard of hearing so learning lyrics is tricky, on the other hand, I cannot quite read enough Mandarin-Chinese characters--so this is why I am emphasizing the context of the music video and what is visually presented throughout.
Since it is still quite early in my Taiwanese learning process, I wanted to emphasize one particular stanza from the song that I think I was able to learn/grasp. Phonetically, this part of the song was very similar to the sounds use in a similar way for Mandarin-Chinese.
For the next post I will start delving into the Bite-Size Taiwanese language learning materials, so I am eager to provide more reflections on actually learning more language from a textbook/workbook. Thanks for tuning in!
平安
---朱自立
