jdesignlab.com » music http://jdesignlab.com Jyoti's Musings Sat, 10 Jul 2010 11:21:21 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0 Learning Urdu in a Novel Way http://jdesignlab.com/music/learning-urdu-in-a-novel-way.html http://jdesignlab.com/music/learning-urdu-in-a-novel-way.html#comments Fri, 20 Mar 2009 18:53:56 +0000 jyoti http://jdesignlab.com/?p=462 Over the years, I’ve found that I like the sound of some Urdu words and even without working too hard, I understand many because they are used in Sindhi—my mother tongue. Some common ones that quickly come to mind are lafz, khabar, vaqt, tang, haalaat etc. However, there are many words used in gazals that elude me altogether and some feel way too critical to ignore. This is when I’m not a great gazal lover, and have even less patience for those sung as odes to alcohol or drinking. But there are some with such beautiful lyrics and sung so sensitively that they demand a salaam.

After listening to one such gazal today on Worldspace, I felt like a couple more rounds of it so found it on Youtube. On the right of the video was reference to a site called Ek fankaar that I decided to check out and found to be quite a nice place.

It encourages learning of Urdu through gazals and hindi songs by including videos followed by lyrics of those songs and then their explanation in English.

Thanks to those translations, now I understand some of my favourite gazals better.

As a treat, I’d like you to listen to two of those :

http://ekfankaar.wordpress.com/2007/07/03/ranjish-hi-sahi/

http://ekfankaar.wordpress.com/2007/07/22/aaj-jaane-ki-zid-na-karo/

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