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Istanbul not Constantinople, Benny’s music video in Turkish


Full disclosure: This post contains affiliate links. ?

My time in Istanbul is officially over – for the next two weeks I'll be with my family in Ireland before hitting the road again. (To find out where I'm going and clues of what the next language will be, see Facebook)

But to wrap up my time in Istanbul, I'd like to share this video I made!

I took the famous song, which was in my head all summer; Istanbul not Constantinople (originally sung by The Four Lads, but also known by the more modern They Might Be Giants take on it), translated it to Turkish and sang it myself! The lyrics are more or less the same, based on the latter version so no subtitles are required 😉

Here it is!

You've heard me sing in French, Spanish, German and Tagalog, and by now you'll have figured out that not having the most beautiful singing voice in the world is definitely not going to stop me from doing it anyway 😉 In fact, since this song was harder to sing than normal, I think I did a pretty bad job at singing and you may want to press mute after a few seconds, or at least laugh at how badly I do it 😛

Rest assured that I make up for it with decent video editing skills and funny and very Turkish scenes!

Two great friends in Istanbul, Timur & Burcu (dancing in a scene together near the end) joined me to film some experiences and places that makes Istanbul stand out for visitors. Once you ignore my clumsy Turkish and bad singing, it's actually a pretty cool video.

I hope you enjoy it 🙂 If you do, please share the video link! Click here to copy to your clipboard for pasting into Facebook (Facebook will open automatically and you just have to right-click and paste into your status update 😉 ), and go directly to Youtube to click the thumbs up or to leave a comment! I'd really appreciate it! Otherwise, comments welcome below as always!

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Benny Lewis

Founder, Fluent in 3 Months

Fun-loving Irish guy, full-time globe trotter and international bestselling author. Benny believes the best approach to language learning is to speak from day one.

Speaks: Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Esperanto, Mandarin Chinese, American Sign Language, Dutch, Irish

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