Learning Chinese From Music

[anon69692]

Hi guys

I'm wondering if there is a website where I can listen to Chinese songs along with their Chinese lyrics and translation of the lyrics in English?

Could this perhaps be a good way to learn some Chinese?

If no such website exists, do you think this could be something popular?

[doraemon]

I think Youtube would be a good choice. They don't always have the English translation for every Chinese song, but you're bound to find some. But sorry I can't give you any more specific ones.

[wushijiao]

Could this perhaps be a good way to learn some Chinese?

Interesting question....here are my few thoughts/feelings about the issue:

Pros

-learning Chinese through music can be effective for those who enjoy the process (note: your learning strategy will always be best when you enjoy it and have personal interest in it. If Chinese music is your hobby, then by all means go for it)!

- Watching a song (Karaoke-style) can be a great way to memorize characters. To a large extent, watching Wang Fei and Dikeniuzai VCD's was one of the main ways I learned to recognize characters.

- You can become better at the more poetic styles of Chinese speech, which sometimes don't appear as often in daily speech or written communication.

-By listening to songs, you get repeated exposure to vocabulary and pronunciation.

Main Con

- I have now come to believe that tones and sentence tones play a crucial role in the listening process, and by extension in the speaking (correctly) process. If I were to give a rough estimate of how Chinese people listen, the way phonemes are pronounced (roughly the pinyin aspect of speech) accounts for around 30-40% of meaning, while tones and sentence intonation account for the rest. In other words, people can "mis-pronounce the "pinyin" aspects of speech to often staggering extents and yet people can still understand because the tones and sentence intonation tend to serve as a backbone. Of course, this description must seem laughable to a trained linguist, but if what I'm saying is correct, then listening to songs as a major strategy in learning Chinese can be problematic in that your ability to listen for tones and sentence intonation go undeveloped. Furthermore, I think it may be possible that certain bad habits (such as speaking in the "laowai neutral tone" and trying to solely focus on pinyin when listening) will be accentuated.

So, overall, I think listening to music isn't a bad idea. In my case, I found that I experienced a major breakthrough in my Spanish listening skills when I started to get into Spanish-language music (I think this mainly comes from a few specific aspects: 1) getting better at connected speech 2) repeated exposure to sample sentences and grammatical forms , which can serve as speaking templates). Based on that experience, I made listening to Chinese music a major aspect of my learning strategy. However, while I did experience the benefits as listed in the pros above, I feel like my time would have been better spent in doing more work with repeated dialogue listening.

Also, now that I'm starting Hindi/Urdu, I can already tell say that songs seem to, again, be of great value in terms of memorization, vocabulary building, connected speech patterns, and pronunciation. Also, when I go home to the US, I often listen to Spanish-language music (both pop and ranchera), and I don't really have many problems in understanding most/all of the lyrics. On the other hand, when listening to an unfamiliar Mandarin song, sometimes I still have troubles making out the lyrics. In part, this could be because I've invested little time into music these days, or it could be due to that fact that I have roughly no interest in Mandarin pop. However, I'm more inclined to feel that the tonal nature of Chinese languages makes music an un-ideal medium for optimal learning.

But of course, that's just a personal feeling. I'm sure there are some people who are completely the opposite.

[ma3zi1]

You might also try 慢速中文 ("Slow Chinese", http://www.slow-chinese.com/). It's a podcast that starting about 2 years ago. There are currently 50-ish episodes, at least 10 of which are recommendations for Chinese rock bands.

Typically, the author introduces a band and their style in a short paragraph (all in Chinese), then he plays a song. If you have an iPod Touch or iPhone, you can scroll through the lyrics as the song plays. If not, you can just look at the lyrics on the website.

[calif90071]

http://www.chinese-tools.com/songs

This website sounds like what you are asking for--here you can download the mp3 for each song, and lyrics are included on the webpage (along with individual character/phrase translations that pop up when you hover the mouse over each character.

Hope this helps!

[Caidanbi]

I can't recommend any websites other than youtube, but what I can recommend is trying to translate the songs yourself. I started doing this after I just started learning, and I learned so many new words and characters that way! And I think I remembered them better than others because I had something fun to relate them to ^-^ Plus, if you read along with the lyrics on karaoke videos, you can learn to read quite fast

[waiguoren]

Terrible idea. Chinese people will laugh at you. Chinese television show producers will model the ubiquitous "sketchy foreigner" character after you, thereby further perpetuating the stereotype that foreigners can't speak Mandarin.

"Tones" (i.e., pitch variations assigned to each phoneme, rigorously adhered to by native speakers) are the essence of spoken Mandarin. Most Chinese songs do not preserve tones, for obvious reasons. The upshot is that you will start to memorize the phonemes as pronounced in your favorite songs and not as they should be pronounced in everyday speech.

I'm about to enter my fourth year of Mandarin study and I still forbid myself to listen to Mandarin songs.

[roddy]

I can't see the tones thing being an issue as long as you actually take the time to look the words up and remember the tones - not really any different from learning Chinese by reading - written Chinese doesn't give you the tones either.

[Meng Lelan]

You might want to try the two volume series I have got, "Learn Chinese through Music" by Wenli Bartholomew. It is very well organized. Each chapter introduces a song, the lyrics in both Chinese and English, vocabulary for that song, accompanying piano score, even grammar notes relevant to that song. The whole book is in English, simplified Chinese, and pinyin, also CDs are included. The set is intended for learners of Mandarin Chinese.

[waiguoren]

Roddy,

Reading Chinese doesn't teach the wrong tone. Contrast with music.

We have all heard the oral Mandarin of those who from the start of their studies failed to do build a good tonal foundation--it's not easy on the ears. Substituting songs for memorization of good dialogues is a great way to botch the tone-learning process.

[roddy]

Fair point, the two aren't exactly equivalent. Although I suspect anyone learning from lyrics would end up with no tones on the words they learn, rather than applying whatever value the song happened to give them (otherwise you'd end up thinking the word '爱‘ has many many tones. And you'd talk real funny).

I guess my point would be that it'll work just fine as a part of vocab discovery, capture and review. Just listening to lots of music with your fingers crossed might not be as efficient as hoped though.

[Caidanbi]

I meant it's a good idea to learn/remember new words, but you do have to look up the tones for each new character you learn. I thought that was a given