Most of us have a notion in our head of what Chinese, Spanish, German, and maybe a handful of other languages sound like, even though most of us don’t speak a word of anything other than English. That is, we can recognize a language without speaking it based on its tone, meter, and phonemes. The comedy show Who’s Line Is It used to have a skit whereby the performers were required to do a scene using a foreign language they didn’t speak. They used this same meta-knowledge about a language to spout gibberish in another tongue.

But have you even wondered what English sounds like to those who don’t speak it? I’m unsure of the motivation, but an Italian singer wrote an entire song using English sounding gibberish. Listening to it, your brain is definitely recognizing the lyrics as “English”, and it’s frankly pretty frustrating because you can’t help but try and make sense of it, despite it not being decodable.

In retrospect, it’s a little like listening to a Bob Dylan song.