Music is fun but catching all the words and understanding all the lyrics in another language is incredibly difficult. Every week I find lots of great new bands and music videos that I want to show my students. Usually these are educational, including English lessons or special vocabulary or even homework questions. This week I’m giving my students a break with a simple music video. Not much English learning here, right? Wrong! Try to figure out what all the members of the band are doing. Who is singing, and who is not? What is the song about? These video clip’s comment says 5 peeps and 1 guitar- what does this mean? Don’t worry if you can’t understand all the lyrics- it commonly takes 5-10 years of focused study to be able to understand 100% of what you hear or see in these videos, and even longer to understand music and lyrics. Cultural differences also add to the difficulty of this task. Just do your best and try to improve a little bit every day. For maximum learning, I suggest you watch each video 3 times or more- the 1st time for the general idea behind the clip then the 2nd time tryfor better detail, and the final time to really bring it all together. Good luck.
This week’s video is a cover by a Canadian band called Walk Off The Earth (or WOTE for short). They have become incredibly popular, with some of their videos getting over 100 million views. Most of their videos are covers, and many people think their covers are better than the original versions. They also have some original songs. The band is comprised of 5 members, but some of their videos are duets or trios or even solos, involving different combinations of band members. The most popular member is the Beard Guy, due to his very calm and quiet nature and his almost unnoticeable but almost important contributions. For this week’s video, I choose WOTE’s cover of Gotye‘s song Somebody that I used to know. If you want to watch more WOTE, I recommend Little Boxes- it’s a very cute video. Enjoy!
Walk Off The Earth- Somebody That I Used To Know (Gotye cover)
Very cool Ed! I was hoping you’d do some Canadian tunes! Keep it up.