Blijven slapen
by Snelle & Maan
How to study this song
The card for “Blijven slapen” is built from 77 study entries at B1: 20 Dutch words, 26 adjectives and 31 verb forms. The glossary is the place to begin — dag, date and gangen are the song’s keywords. It is unusually descriptive — 26 adjectives alongside 20 everyday words — so expect colour rather than plot. At this level part of the list will already be familiar; the rest is what closes the gap.
The words of this song, in several languages
Every word below is taken from this song and translated by us. Nothing here is the lyric itself — these are the individual words you need in order to follow it.
Vocabulary
| NL | EN | ES | IT | FR | PT |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| dag | day | día | giorno | jour | dia |
| date | date (romantic meeting) | cita | appuntamento |
Adjectives
| NL | EN | ES | IT | FR | PT |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| alleen | alone, only | solos, a solas | da soli | seuls | sozinhos |
| casual | casual (loanword) | informal (anglicismo) |
Verb forms
| NL | EN | ES | IT | FR | PT |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| doe | I do | hago | faccio | je fais | faço |
| aangedaan | put on (past participle of aandoen) | puesto (participio de aandoen) |
What this song teaches you
Level · B1
- Vocabulary words
- 20
- Adjectives
- 26
- Word combos
- 7
- Expressions
- 10
- Verb forms
- 31
- Quiz questions
- 35
Background
About the song
«Blijven slapen» arrived on 26 February 2021, in the middle of a Dutch winter in which the clubs were shut and nobody was going on dates at all, and it proceeded to sit at the top of the Nederlandse Top 40 for ten straight weeks. It pairs two performers who were already famous separately and who had never made a record together. Snelle is Lars Sebastiaan Bos, born in Deventer on 3 October 1995 and raised in the Gelderland village of Gorssel; his stage name is the Dutch word for the fast one, and he had been rapping since his teens before breaking through nationally in 2019. Maan is Maan de Steenwinkel, born in Utrecht on 10 February 1997, who won the sixth season of The Voice of Holland in 2016 and who in 2019 became the first winner of that programme to put a single at number one on the Top 40. Between them they covered most of the Dutch pop audience, and the record was built to use that.
The song was written at Snelle’s house by the two singers together with Arno Krabman, Okke Punt and Delano Ruitenbach, and produced by Krabman with Jimmy Huru. The melody did not come out of the writing session at all: Snelle has said he had already worked it out in the shower the day before, which is the sort of origin story that sounds like an anecdote and is in fact a good description of how the tune behaves. It is short, it loops, and it is the kind of line that fixes itself in a listener’s head on first hearing. The finished track runs two minutes and fifty seconds, which is barely longer than a radio jingle, and it is built on a light disco pulse rather than on a trap beat — one of the reasons it travelled so far outside the usual rap audience.
The structure is the real point of interest, and it is worth explaining because it is what makes the record work as a teaching object as much as a hit. The song is a conversation between two registers. Maan sings the framing sections in sung, melodic, fully articulated Dutch: a woman getting ready for an evening out, second-guessing the dress, worrying she left too early, wondering how late the last train runs, wondering whether the person she is meeting is right for her at all. Then Snelle takes a verse and the whole texture changes. His part is rapped, fast, and written in the Dutch people actually speak rather than the Dutch that is written down — pronouns shrink, words fuse, and the line lands on the beat instead of on the grammar. Putting a rapped verse inside a pop song was not new in 2021, but the two halves here are unusually well matched: the same words come back in both, which lets the listener hear the same vocabulary twice, once sung slowly and once spoken fast.