Hallo alle zusammen! This week’s Tune for Tuesday comes from German band Nena, who were together between 1981 and 1987. The band is very important to German musical culture, as it was part of the forming of the German New Wave scene (Neue Deutsche Welle). In 1984 their song 99 Luftballons was a huge international success, becoming one of the most popular foreign-language tracks in the history of the US charts.
If you’re a Coffee Break German learner, it’s a good song to listen to, as the vocabulary isn’t too tricky and the lead singer sings fairly clearly. It’s also good practice for your numbers! How many times can you hear her sing “neunundneunzig” (“ninety-nine”)? Let us know in the comments if you think you know! If you’d like to hear the lyrics sung more slowly, we recommend watching the YouTube video below and selecting a slower playback speed by clicking on the settings symbol.
Whichever language you’re learning, we hope you enjoy this song and check out the others in our multilingual Spotify and YouTube playlist below.
For copyright reasons, we cannot publish the lyrics to 99 Luftballons, but you can find them online here.