唱歌(chànggē) – Sing

Last night, after playing my weekly game of basketball, we met some friends at one of the many卡拉OK (Karaoke or KTV) places for an evening of唱歌. I have written a few times about how many people sing in the parks, well that must just be practice for when they go for an evening of KTV. These places are usually very popular. At some of them you can get dinner and full bar service along with the entrance fee, but they tend to be expensive. At one such establishment, they have 10-12 beautiful young women stand at the front door, dressed in white flowing dresses, elegantly made up, with a tiara topping their perfectly set hair. As you walk in the front door they bow and give you a warm welcome. Needless to say, we did not stay there. It was 太贵了 (tui4 gui4 le5) too expensive.
The place we went last night is a place we have gone to before. It is relatively nice, and the prices are not too bad. It cost about 120 RMB for six hours, which is a little over $17 US. When I told the lady at the desk that we wanted to唱歌, she said it would be 400 RMB per hour. I told her that that price was different from the last time we were there. She asked me what we paid before and when I told her, she quickly retracted and gave us the usual price. It seems our language lessons are starting to save us some money.
Another nice thing about this place it is that it has a decent selection of music in English, and we have our own private room so that we can sing as loud and poorly as we want because we are amongst friends. That really appeals to Amanda. Back home, I could never get her to sing when we went to Karaoke. Once we got things setup, we had a wonderful time singing, listening to each other sing, and as always with Karaoke, laughing with and at each other. I have recently been learning a Chinese song to sing, and last night I gave it a shot. Once again, the Chinese lessons proved their worth because even though the words were totally in characters, I was able to do a decent job of following along. I am going to keep practicing until I can sing the whole thing by reading. One of the methods that we were taught at our TESOL class for teaching language was through the use of music. I am going to use that method on myself, because everyone who knows is aware of how I love to唱歌. - 付伟国
PS – The song that I sang is called Putong Pengyou by David Tao. Here is a link to the site that I use, it has lyrics and music, and if you allow your cursor to hover over the characters, it translates for you. Enjoy.
http://www.chinese-tools.com/songs/song/94/putong-pengyou.html

“The fish in the water is silent, the animals on the earth is noisy, the bird in the air is singing. But man has in him the silence of the sea, the noise of the earth and the music of the air.”
Rabindranath Tagore quotes (Indian Poet)