My Dear Ellie - Southern All Stars (Is translating songs a good way to learn Japanese?)

Turn on CC (Closed Captioning) for the english translation!!!

We’ve finally reached the 6th song in my Japanese song translating blog series, this is the last song I’m planning on translating for a while (documented to this extent). This time we’re going to translate いとしのエリー(Itoshi no Eri/My Dear Ellie) which came out in the year 1979 by the band Southern All Stars（サザンオールスターズ）. I partly picked this song because my mentor for this project, who was my Japanese professor from Wellesley, said that this was one of her favorite songs, and partly because it’s really catchy. I would catch myself humming parts of it in the library, in my room, in the shower, so I decided to go for it.

Interestingly, the lead singer of Southern All Stars is Keisuke Kuwata, who sang “Johnny the Surfer” which was the very first song in this series. The lyrics felt deceptively easy before I started translating it. My expectation was that this would be the simplest song to translate yet, but instead it has turned out to be the hardest in this series. Here’s just one of the many lines I had trouble with:

誘い涙の日が落ちる (Sasoi namida no hi ga ochiru)

This is how I initially parsed this phrase

誘い 涙の 日 が 落ちる

誘い (sasoi)	Invitation
涙の (namida no)	Tears’
日が (hi ga)	Day
落ちる (ochiru)	To Fall

So my initial attempt at translating this phrase was,

Invitation tears’ day will fall.

Which sounds like something you’d get on a fortune cookie, and I had no clue what it meant, so I did some creative guessing. My thought was that the keywords in this was “day,” “tears’,” and “to fall.” I then further postulated that “to fall” actually meant “to end.” Maybe the line was trying to convey the feeling that when the fated day comes, their relationship will end, so he’d be really sad. So here I am trying to figure out what the best way to make it sound good in English. And this is what I came up with.

So you should laugh more baby, carefreeness on my mind

Express yourself more baby, looking cool in your sight

Until the day you leave me,

Ellie my love so sweet

And that was my best guess. A few days later I had a scheduled meeting with my mentor to go over my translation. Anddddddd, I totally missed the mark. Not like completely off, since the sentiment is still kinda there, but like definitely not bullseye.

What she had pointed out to me was that I had parsed the sentence incorrectly.

誘い涙の日が落ちる (Sasoi namida no hi ga ochiru)

She offered a different parsing suggestion:

誘い涙 の 日が落ちる

誘い涙 の (sasoi namida no)	Tears of Sympathy’s
日が落ちる (hi ga ochiru)	Sunset

誘い涙 (sasoi namida) isn’t really a phased that’s used, but my sensei postulated that it was trying to be a fancier version of もらい泣き (morai naki), which literally translates to “tears that are received,” and refers to the kind of crying that you do when you see someone else crying or sad.

Also I was translating each word a little too granularly before, I had saw 日が落ちる as the “day will fall,” but 日 (hi) not only means day, but also means sun. “Sun will fall” translates to “sunset,” it all makes a lot of sense.

We talked a little bit about what

Tears of Sympathy’s Sunset,

could potentially mean, and I don’t really think we got anywhere. We both agreed that it was confusing. Later that night I did some investigating on the internet, and came upon someone asking the same exact question on Yahoo answers Japan: “Exactly what does 誘い涙の日が落ちる mean?” And the posters seemed to think that it was more like,

while the sun set, my tears also fall (涙が落ちながら日が落ちる),

which is kinda like a pun since both the sun and his tears fall. Though I suppose it’s meant to be poetic rather than funny.

So in the end the verse got translated to:

So you should laugh more baby, carefreeness on my mind

Express yourself more baby, looking cool in your sight

And as the sun sets, these tears they fall

Ellie my love so sweet

Reflection on the series as a whole

I was going to write a few more examples for how this song was difficult to translate, but it takes so much explaining to make it make sense for a non-Japanese audience, and I don’t want to lose your attention or waste your time. Since this is the last song that I’m translating for this series I thought that this would be a good chance to do some reflection.

So before I started working on this project, I had to write a project proposal for how I would go about doing this, and what were my learning objectives. My learning goals list was ordered from most important to still important (but less so).

1. Learn new vocabulary through songs
2. Learn new kanji from songs
3. Learn new readings from kanji from songs
4. Improve my familiarity with the language
5. Learn new grammar points
6. Improve my reading speed
7. Learn how to shoot and edit simple music videos
8. Get better at singing

I’m going to now re-rank them in order of how well I think I accomplished each goal:

1. Improve my familiarity with the language
2. Learn how to shoot and edit simple music videos
3. Get better at singing (at least on camera)
4. Improve my reading speed
5. Learn new vocabulary through songs
6. Learn new kanji from songs
7. Learn new readings from kanji from songs
8. Learn new grammar points

So you’ll probably quickly notice that the list is more or less flipped now. Learning a language is a decent amount of hard work, you’ll notice that anything that started with the word “learn” ranked kinda low on what I felt like I accomplished. There were definitely new words in every song that I didn’t know, and I did go look them up in a dictionary. But the thing is, translating it once doesn’t mean you know the word, and translating it twice probably doesn’t either. If you’re going for true learning what you need to be aiming for is exposure, the number of times you engage with a concept.

Because I was only translating six songs total, it was hard to get the amount of exposure needed to remember those words (short of just writing them on flashcards and committing them to memory, but where’s the fun in that?). But, the key to learning is exposure, so even though I was only translating a phrase once or twice, I would occasionally hear it again watching anime, or see it reading manga, and go “huh, that sounds familiar.”

So although you could argue that I didn’t learned as much as I would’ve had I been studying Japanese in a classroom setting, doing solo karaoke in my room with a ukulele definitely made it more fun. It was so much easier to motivate myself to translate a song that I was singing, than to “write a letter to Satoshi, your penpal in Hokkaido, your topic is ‘places around you’”. And honestly once you graduate college (which I will be doing soon), I feel like motivation to continue learning a language, is way harder but so much more valuable.