Why doesn't anyone know of Perfume? They rock. Morning Musume is just a bit shit. I mean maybe if you're 12 yeah why not but it's nothing serious. Perfume is the shit.

Steve Kaufman talks very often about this. He attributes part of his language learning success to being able to identify himself as someone from other culture.

He says, and I agree that it's different from simply liking the culture. It's more like wanting to be part of that group. Wanting to be the same as them.

I've seen people learning Portuguese that lost their accents and their pronunciation improved quickly. And I've seen people that remain with the same terrible accent.

The different that the second group, even loving Brazilian culture, are too much proud of their own countries and in someway like to be identified as foreigners: Argentinians that cannot accept that Pele is much better than Maradona ^_^.

Not that this is a problem here. Foreign accents are well received.

Tobberoth Wrote:Comparing Wonder Girls and Girls Generation to Morning Musume is quite weak. Morning Musume have never made even a single good song, unlike both of those Korean bands.

I would rather say that mainstream produced KPop is in a different league all together than mainstream JPop which is almost always horrible.

Wonder Girls actually top my list of worst pop groups of all time. My favorite Kpop act is no doubt Kara, which is absolutely horrible and has the worst dancing in their videos but makes me laugh so very much. Remember folks, if you wanna pretty, every wanna pretty. I'm your beautiful girl.

Better than most Jpop, actually, which is almost as awful but doesn't make me laugh as much.

As a side note, I really wish there were some good Japanese bands out there that I could find, but so far it's just Shingetsu (who broke up a long time ago, and the CDs are rare and cost a bunch) and Shingifudepaato (who never even released a cd). Acts like Nujabes and Yoko Kanno are great, but aren't usually in Japanese. To be fair, popular music in English is usually awful too, but I'm quite able to find not-so-popular good stuff.

mentat_kgs Wrote:Steve Kaufman talks very often about this. He attributes part of his language learning success to being able to identify himself as someone from other culture.

He says, and I agree that it's different from simply liking the culture. It's more like wanting to be part of that group. Wanting to be the same as them.

I've seen people learning Portuguese that lost their accents and their pronunciation improved quickly. And I've seen people that remain with the same terrible accent.

The different that the second group, even loving Brazilian culture, are too much proud of their own countries and in someway like to be identified as foreigners: Argentinians that cannot accept that Pele is much better than Maradona ^_^.

Not that this is a problem here. Foreign accents are well received.

Thanks, you reminded me why I posted this. I think it ties in well with my feelings, once rambled about to playadom regarding music and immersion, about 'immersion' being, for me, about more than just improving linguistic ability or achieving some kind of artificial Japanese-ness in relation to my conditioned Western-ness, it's about using whatever tools I can to experience everything that the target language entails--which includes the cultural matrix whence it sprung and feeds back into--combining it with myself in a kind of counterbalancing act, and getting past all our intrinsic biases to this kind of abstract zone of perspectival/perceptual neutrality where it simply is what it is.

Even if nothing else, the very effort alone in conceiving of this in a 'meta' way and attempting it requires and articulates a kind of empathy that improves language learning at the root by giving us space to accept the differing, often contrasting nuances of the 'foreign', part of that feedback loop of the personality change that comes with learning a new language, getting fresh/refreshed insights and viewpoints not only on the new language/culture but on one's own. I guess I was thinking this article was a tentative clinical example of that relationship.

mezbup Wrote:Why doesn't anyone know of Perfume? They rock. Morning Musume is just a bit shit. I mean maybe if you're 12 yeah why not but it's nothing serious. Perfume is the shit.

Word

bombpersons Wrote:

mezbup Wrote:Why doesn't anyone know of Perfume? They rock. Morning Musume is just a bit shit. I mean maybe if you're 12 yeah why not but it's nothing serious. Perfume is the shit.

Word

Perfume is like what happens if Yellow Magic Orchestra and an Autotune AI had sex and pimped their daughters off to otaku. So embarrassing, yet so catchy.

What I want to know is, can any Korean noise rock band compete with Boredoms?