Improve listening skills with songs

[spittips]

Dear all,

Anyone trying to learn Mandarin and improve listening skills with songs? Is that effective? I start to do that and have created some subtitled video to help my learning. See if it can help you too, enjoy and any comment is welcome.

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童話

Cheers.

[calibre2001]

It definitely helps but the the results are even better one could read Chinese. In my experience literacy actually helped my listening alot aside improving my knowledge of phrases, vocab ietc. I feel that's because our ears are more used capturing words we already know rather than what we don't know. In other words, unless the words we don;t know are frequenlty repeated, they only sound gibberish to the untrained ear. I'm not saying that listening a song purely thru listening is not a good method, it is provided your knowledge of the language is sufficient.

I usually just watch off the karaoke versions off sites like Youtube. Some songs with more powerful vocab which I find interesting are Beyond songs. They are rather meaningful too.

[skylee]

The one shortcoming that I can think of about learning from songs is that you don't really get the tones of the characters correctly. While you may be able to listen to and understand every word of a song, at the same time it might adversely affect the accuracy of your tones.

Plus you have to choose the songs carefully. No good listening to Jay Chou IMHO.

I was half asleep this morning and the radio played the song "但願人長久" sung by Teresa Teng. Ah perfect pronunctiation, I said to myself, and then went back to sleep.

[calibre2001]

Watch plenty of TV serials (and talk shows if necessary). Only problem is they speak very fast.

[spittips]

Thanks for the comments and agree that the intonation is very important.

For me, it is a very good exercise doing the transcription. It is much harder than I thought. Normally, I will do that without looking at any lyrics at all for the first few times and after I finished, there are some places I can never get it, so, I look it up and correct my errors. And I really learn from those mistakes.

Interesting enough, I see others start doing the same thing.

http://www.l2exchange.com/videoSub/public

And as I am learning japanese at the same time, I think the same technique can be applied to japanese learning as well.

[skylee]

I did the same when I was at school learning English. Good luck.

[Ari 桑]

I learn the words to any song I find that I like. The lyrics stay in your head, so they help you memorize stuff fast. Plus you score major cool points with pretty chinese people on friday nights.

I generally search for the lyrics on google, then copy and paste over to NJstar, so that way I get the right pronunciation. 周杰伦 is ridiculous by the way. Half the time I have problems just matching up the lyrics to what he is saying. Silly Jay.

[crow610]

Try watching Chinese soap operas. Not the ones that take place in ancient times becuase they will most likely use a lot of complicated phrases but the ones that are commedys or tragedys taking place in modern times. The plots are usually pretty straight forward and the dialogue is what you might hear on a day to day basis. My preference is watching Korean Soaps but you might find others you prefer.

Here are a couple that I recomend:

浪漫曼舞

悲伤恋歌

蓝色生死恋

[milesaway]

I can't comment on this cos I'm actually native. But interestingly, from time to time can't understand a Chinese song's lyrics, even if that's general pop, not crazy rap.

[muyongshi]

I can't comment on this cos I'm actually native. But interestingly, from time to time can't understand a Chinese song's lyrics, even if that's general pop, not crazy rap.

This is typical in every language every where in the world. The qualities used in singing is very different (not all the time but frequently) than those used in speaking. So, don't be to frustrated. But the more you listen the better (it should get) but don't expect to ever understand 100% 100% of the time.

[milesaway]

Agreed. Some singers mumble in singing and you know, Jay Chou is the biggest offender.