Can I buy a book of Chinese lyrics in English?

[fantasyvn]

Hi everyone, I would like to read more Chinese pop music lyrics to understand and appreciate the language.

 

To your knowledge, is there a translated book which features the best of Chinese popular music? By 'Chinese' in this context, I mean the pop songs from the PRC, Taiwan, Hong Kong, etc.

[Demonic_Duck]

Not sure about books, although I'd be surprised if none exist. Here's a thread with some websites in, though:

 

http://www.chinese-forums.com/index.php?/topic/43223-two-good-websites-for-you-to-enjoy-chinese-songs/

 

First one just contains lyrics with pinyin which can be hovered over to find the meaning of individual words. Second one contains lyrics, pinyin and translation.

 

Another good resource is Baidu music (only works within mainland China, though). Many tracks contain lyrics that display in the sidebar and scroll in time to the music. Combining this with a popup dictionary like Perapera (for Firefox) or Zhongwen popup (for Chrome) is a great way to learn songs. I'd imagine this would be rather slow going as a beginner, though.

[elina]

How about the two books:

Learn Chinese through Music + CD-ROM

http://www.studychineseculture.com/search.asp?keyword=Learn+Chinese+through+Music&thetype=bookname&submit1=SEARCH

In the books, there’re synopsis of the song, Chinese lyrics, Pinyin lyrics and English translation, vocabulary, word chain, grammatical key points, exercises, notes, etc., you could click the pictures to see inside of the books.

[fantasyvn]

Hi Elina, thank you for the link. Do you know what king of songs are there in the books? It is listed in the Children section, so I was wondering if these are songs for children.

[elina]

From the pictures inside the book, every book has 16 songs, we just added the song names to the table of contents on our site for convenient seeing, please check again.

 

The books were published in 2007, so the songs may be not that ‘fresh’, which include traditional folk songs, modern popular music, children's songs.

 

Since there’re Pinyin lyrics and English translation, it’s easy and simple to learn, so we listed the books in the children section.

[Ruben von Zwack]

Not a book, but a website: For Jay Chou, I like the translations on Jaychoustudio - it's fan made, not an official website.

My only gripe with them is that the pinyin doesn't have tone marks, but I guess that is complaining on a high level. Their translations sections is really neat and well organised. Once you found the song via the chronological album list or "translations", just a mousecklick switches between Simplified Chinese lyric, Traditional Chinese lyric, and English translation.