I’m experimenting with Posterous, and this is my first cross-post (I tried to automate it but didn’t work):
Many people say that English is one of the easiest languages to master, as grammar is relatively simple, you don’t have to learn accents, and verbs are typically limited to a handful of variations. True, but English also happens to be a very tricky language when it comes to pronunciation. In Portuguese, Spanish, French, Italian, German and Japanese, you can learn how to pronounce most words just based on a few rules. In English, that’s rarely the case: “go” and “do”, “cough” and “though”, “over” and “cover” are all pronounced very differently, notwithstanding their spelling similarities.
But if you learned English as an adult, nothing compares to listening to songs and trying to figure out what they are all about. Nat King Cole and Louis Armstrong were probably among the few singers I could understand without any kind of supporting material.
My son loves watching “Harry and His Bucket Full of Dinosaurs”. I’ve been watching that with him for months now, and the only thing I could get from the opening theme was actually the part where they say “Harry and HIs Bucket Full of Dinosaurs”!!! I tried to turn the closed captioning on, but nothing came out (not sure if it’s a broadcasting issue or wrong TV/cable setup one).
Today, that mystery was solved as I found this captioned version of the theme in YouTube:
How on Earth am I supposed to understand this song??? You probably need a degree in both English and Palaeontology to grasp the just of it. I can’t wait until my son is 7 and starts teaching me English.
Here are the lyrics, if you also have a pre-schooler and, like me, need a cheat sheet:
Stegosaurus, Pterodactyl, Tyrannosaurus Rex
Scelidosaurus, Apatosaurus, Triceratops is next
Taury, Patsy, Sid and Trike
Pterence, Steggy, what a sight!
It’s Harry and His Bucket Full of Dinosaurs
To get on board the magic ride
All we do is jump inside
With Harry and His Bucket
His bucket full of dinosaurs!
Update: The title of the post had a problem (it became “401”), so I changed it to something more meaningful and applied some minor edits.
The bamboo raft 
I think Posterous is meant as the place you send your posts and it will send it to your other sites (e.g. twitter, wordpress, facebook, youtube) automatically using the autopost feature.
However, this would mean I would have to remove the automatic posting from my existing services (like Twitter to Facebook sync).
Way behind with blogging and handling comments!
Archie, thanks for the tips on Posterous. My attempt to post to this blog via Posterous actually worked, it just took a while and I thought it had failed.
I watch this show with my niece everyday. It took me a while to figure out all the words and English is the only language i know haha actually i had one of the names wrong until i watched your video a few minutes ago, thanks for that 🙂
Marissa,
LOL! I just found the version in Portuguese (my native language) in YouTube and can’t fully understand it either.
Thanks for finally decoding and sharing the lyrics. I often wondered what those dinosaurs are because I couldn’t make out the words from the theme. I always watch this programme with my child and I have to sing it for him because I think he expects me to…….(and I even memorized Thomas and Friends lyrics just for him!). But I admit, the theme song is so catchy and I usually found myself humming it. Thanks again for posting…..:)