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This week, KTV Wednesday brings you one of our favorite covers by Taiwanese singer Richie Jen. And before you ask, we don't know what the dancing glitter monsters are doing on stage. Asian concerts are like this, you'll just have to adjust.If you divert your attention to the lyrics, you'll notice that our two verses are characterized by literary expressions and verb duplications that translate ambiguously and are even somewhat forced in the interest of symmetry. Don't try speaking like this - the chorus is where you should spend your time, and especially the construction involving 让 followed by an object and then an adjective or verb. This is an incredibly useful construction that you'll hear repeatedly and will use repeatedly too. It means "let [object] [verb]" or "let [object] be [adjective]".Also worth noting is the frequency of verbs paired with the ending "liao3". 了 in this situation means "to the end" or "to the finish", and signifies that the action is done to completion.
brett
said on October 29, 2008
I'm pretty sure I've heard this before... it sounds so familiar. Was it the theme song to a television show?
benchannevy
said on October 30, 2008
very entertaining and nice way to listen and learn Mandarin Chinese
nkletnieks
said on October 30, 2008
could be familiar bacause this was used throughout 任逍遥 ("Unknown Pleasures") dir 賈樟柯 Jia Zhang Ke. The film however has Zhao Tao dancing rather than glitter monsters (as a promotion for mongolian king baijiu!)
trevelyan
said on October 31, 2008
@nkletnieks, I remember seeing that film ages ago. Never made the connection with the title though.
garnet4david2001
said on November 2, 2008
I am a big fans of him. However i am confused, his name should be ren xian qi, i know that long time ago we used to pronounce ren as jen. However, i think we should call him ren xian qi instead of jen xian qi haha
barrister
said on November 3, 2008
I'm accustomed to him being Richie Jen as well. Assumed that was a Taiwanese habit, since his last name is definitely ren in pinyin.
swigr
said on November 3, 2008
This was an excellent selection. I always feel relieved when the karaoke songs have traditional characters. Maybe for future songs with simplified characters a link could be posted to a version with tradtional characters - just an idea. Some of richie's other songs like "Shing Tai Ruan" are also good for language learning.
trevelyan
said on November 3, 2008
Google is giving us around 120,000 hits for Richie Ren as compared to only about 50,000 for Richie Jen. So we'll change that....
@swigr - we were actually going to run with 心太软, but went with this since it's a bit less played (think it's a better song too). Am also fond of 伤心太平洋, although the official music video is a bit overproduced for that one.
orbital
said on November 4, 2008
changing the title of this lesson just made this pop-up in Google Reader again for me. Not that I terribly mind, but you probably want to be careful about doing this for older content.
trevelyan
said on November 4, 2008
Just noticed that myself. We'll try to avoid this in the future unless necessary.
oolong_2000
said on July 6, 2009
"This video has been removed due to terms of use violation. "
i found this http://www.youtube.com/watch?hl=en&v=iGAE-ndTicY
让我悲也好让我悔也好 \:d/
orbital
said on July 6, 2009
"Richie Jen... too cool for Youtube."
Hell just went endothermic folks.
Echo
said on July 6, 2009
任贤齐-- this is his Chinese name. He had some really good songs which were quite popular in 90s. Such as 春天花会开, 浪花一朵朵 and 水晶 etc.
--Echo
echo@popupchinese.com
trevelyan
said on July 6, 2009
@orbital - I really like 任贤齐 actually. And this is a good song. Was just busy putting up our lesson for the day, but I'll see if I can find an alternate version to embed.
--dave
trevelyan
said on July 6, 2009
blessing in disguise. I think we've got the official music video up there now. so fewer glitter monsters but a more professional MV otherwise. I'll call it a win....
--dave
pefferie
said on September 3, 2011
For those in China - a youku link http://v.youku.com/v_show/id_XMjk3NDQwMDg0.html
