Has anyone else here learned Swedish through Kent?

[SportfreundeFCkeane]

Working at IKEA?

[Fargo]

Working at IKEA?

No,no,no... There're more companies in Sweden than IKEA

[Too-ticki]

Thread-excavation time! (This is what happens when you let archaeologists onto message boards.)

One of the first things I tried to apply Swedish to was understanding Kent lyrics, to the horror/amusement of my partner. Röd came out a few months after I started ineffectually trying to learn the language from books (yeah, that went well - but I think it paid off later when I moved here and started studying properly, because I had bits of grammar and so on ready to use), and I tried so hard to figure out Vals för satan... if I got there in the end it was only because partner has infinite patience.

But I work my way through Kent lyrics quite a bit right now, in with all the other stuff (books, TV, radio, lurking on messageboards for Swedish rock bands...) I do to try and learn faster. So hey! They're helping! Kind of! (God, I would never try to learn pronunciation from Jocke's singing voice, though. My listening skills are pretty good but he just defeats me half the time. It sounds great, so hey, but.)

[solanum_nigrum]

I started learning Swedish and shortly afterwards was introduced to Kent songs by my Swedish teacher. That was when the obsession with the band and the language started. ;-) I really wanted to understand the lyrics, but my Swedish course did not help so much - it was basically tourist Swedish I was taught there.
As a language student, however, I was somehow used to translating texts and so at least managed to roughly grasp what my favourite songs are about. But if you want to learn Swedish from songs, there are probably easier bands than Kent. The ambiguities and metaphors in the lyrics are really confusing for beginners of Swedish.

[Too-ticki]

Yeah, they aren't the clearest! On the other hand it can give you a look into how complex the language actually is, and the things that can be done with it. But I say this having had the help of a native speaker the whole time I was working through... I guess that without it could get really frustrating. (They're not the only swedish-language songs I worked on, either... another singer whose songs I translated was Maud Lindström, but I have to say I didn't actually find her that much easier: she's much more direct, but uses a huge amount of slang that I sometimes struggled pretty hard to get right.)

[Reina]

Yeah, even though I speak Swedish in everyday life now, I can still misunderstand Kents lyrics because of the huge amount of metaphors and such. Which is exactly the last and most difficult thing to learn for a foreigner. For example, I only just found out that he isn't actually shooting everything in front of him in Palace and Main, as the lyrics would literally mean, haha.I felt so stupid when realizing that But hey, if he shoots a dj first, you can't blame me for assuming that he's just a pretty violent guy and keeps on shooting throughout the song, can you?

When trying to understand the songs, it doesn't help much that Jocke doesn't ever seem to bother articulating either. I've heard many Swedes who need to look up the written lyrics to find out what on earth the guy is singing.

[stjärnor]

I often think I know the lyrics, then I look at the text and I'm singing some random words! The first time I really realised this was one day I was watching kent videos on Youtube, and a video for Dom andra was playing, and the person had put the lyrics (in English) on the video. I immediately thought it was some kind parody, as I had seen a parody video for a kent song with English words that sounded like the Swedish around that time. (memory fails me to which song it was, it was posted on the forum somwhere).

Surely Jocke couldn't be singing about a lonely heart ad? A quick check of the lyrics, and I was proven wrong!
En ensam kvinna söker en man/ A lonely woman seeks a man

I have no idea what I had been singing for that first line, but it certainly wasn't that!

[Too-ticki]

koelkast - my partner interpreted it as literal shooting as well, and she's a native speaker, so I dunno! I can see a few different ways of reading that line, I guess.

And yeah, there are definitely songs where some lines just vanish into a string of vowels...

I actually also have trouble with some of the songs which have English versions, I have to say, because I'd been listening to Kent in English for quite a while before I even thought about learning Swedish (got sent Isola & Hagnesta Hill in English by a friend who thought it might be easier to get into if I could understand the words)... I don't listen to the English versions any more really (they're just not as good) but some bits of the lyrics are sort of ingrained and I tangle myself up with that. Trying to sing along to 747 in Swedish at Långholmsparken was pretty tough!