Girls Just Want to Have Fun
by Cyndi Lauper
How to study this song
Learning “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” means 41 entries at A1+ — 20 English words, 4 adjectives and 17 verb forms, every one taken from what the song actually says. The glossary is the place to begin — home, morning and light are the song’s keywords. This one leans on its verbs: 17 distinct forms against 4 adjectives, so conjugation is where the effort goes. At this level the goal is recognition: hear a word, place it, keep going.
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
| EN | ES | IT | FR | PT | NL | DE |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| home | casa, hogar | casa | maison, chez-soi | casa, lar |
What this song teaches you
Level · A1+
- Vocabulary words
- 20
- Adjectives
- 4
- Word combos
- 12
- Expressions
- 10
- Verb forms
- 17
- Quiz questions
- 35
Background
About the song
«Girls Just Want to Have Fun» is the song that turned Cyndi Lauper into a star. Portrait Records released it in October 1983 as the first single from «She’s So Unusual», her debut solo album, which had reached the shops only a few days earlier. It is a bright new wave pop song that lasts just under four minutes. Rick Chertoff produced it with William Wittman, and the album was recorded at the Record Plant in New York between May and August of 1983.
Lauper did not write the song. It was written in 1979 by Robert Hazard, a musician from the Philadelphia area, who recorded it only as a demo and played it with his own bands. His version was told from a man’s point of view. When Chertoff suggested the song to Lauper, she agreed to sing it only after changing part of the words, so that the story is told by the girl herself. That small change gave the song a completely new meaning: it stopped being a boy’s boast and became a cheerful statement about women’s freedom.
The recording has a strong Philadelphia connection. Rob Hyman, on keyboards, and Eric Bazilian, on bass, were members of the band The Hooters, and they shaped the arrangement around a bouncing synthesiser line and a drum machine programmed by Anton Fig. Rick DiFonzo played the electric guitar. Among the backing singers were the songwriter Jules Shear and Ellie Greenwich, who had co-written some of the best-known girl-group hits of the sixties.
The story in the song is simple. A young woman gets back to her parents’ house at dawn, and her mother wants to know when she is going to start living properly. Later the telephone wakes the house during the night and her father shouts the same kind of question. She answers both of them warmly, but she does not give way. In the last verse she talks about boys who find a pretty girl and then keep her shut away from everyone else, and she says that she would rather be out in the daylight. The chorus repeats one idea: when work is finished, girls want to enjoy themselves.
For learners of English the song is useful because the vocabulary is short and it comes back again and again. It also shows how English is really spoken: two of its most frequent words are relaxed spoken forms that you will hear everywhere but rarely see in a textbook.