Mandarin Dance/Techno pop

[Desmond]

Hey guys,

I'm looking for Chinese music with a real dancy or techno-like kind of beat to it to help me learn mandarin (and plus that's the genre of music I like the most!)

Anyone know of any?

Thanks!

[wai ming]

I actually came across a Chinese dance music compilation CD while browsing in my local library once. If I remember correctly, a lot of the songs were by someone called 芭比 (Barbie?). And apparently S.H.E's song 美丽新世界 also counts as dance music, in that album.

You can also look for some Chinese covers of Korean dance/techno music, eg Sammi Cheng （郑秀文）'s covers of Lee Jung Hyun's songs, 眉飞色舞 and 独一无二.

Hmm... there's also Elva (萧亚轩)'s song 一个人的精彩.

Anyway, good luck... most popular Chinese music falls squarely into the pop-ballady kind of genre

[Ferno]

Mandarin/Chinese doesn't work very well with fast-paced music because losing all the tones in the words already makes music hard to understand and ambiguous, so if you speed up the singing and add distortion from a fast beat it gets even worse. That's why most Chinese music is the slow, ballad type like wai ming said. I don't think you'll learn much, and just listening to music won't teach you any langauge

but still, off the top of my head there is 女力 (nuu li/nu li) by Landy Wen (温岚). Also a lot of stuff by Elva Xiao (sometimes Hsiao) is pretty dancy... ie the song Ai De Zhu Da Ge (you're going to have to get a Chinese person to find the characters for that one, there must be a million different characters for those syllables )

[Ferno]

hmm is there any significance to the SHE girls talking in Japanese at the begining of the 美丽新世界 track or has Japanese gained some sort of pop-culture significance in Chinese songs?

Kind of off-topic, but does anyone know why 美丽 was used? I had to look it up, I had always seen "beautiful" as a single-syllable word (美)... is there a rule for this?

[or should I post this in grammar and vocab?]

[wai ming]

If you really want to learn Chinese by listening to music, it's not just a matter of listening to a song once. You listen to it multiple times, get a copy of the lyrics, follow the lyrics while listening to the song, memorise the lyrics, and for fast songs, practise saying the words slowly until you can sing it at the same speed as the original! It's not impossible, I learnt to sing Stefanie Sun (孙燕姿)'s 绿光 (Green Light) that way, and that's a pretty fast song (Don't know if it counts as dance music, but I seem to remember some tap-dancing in the concert performance...)

In fact, it's not a bad idea to learn to sing fast songs, it helps you get used to fast speech, and it helps you get familiar with Chinese syllables and sounds.

The characters for Elva Xiao (萧亚轩)'s "Ai de Zhu Da Ge" are 爱的主打歌.

Japanese is pretty popular in (modern) Taiwanese culture, so that's probably why S.H.E speak Japanese at the beginning of 美丽新世界.

As for why 美丽 is used instead of 美，sometimes 2 syllables sound better than 1, and 美丽 is a pretty common word.

[skylee]

美麗新世界 = brave new world

[Ferno]

wai ming: do you memorize the lyrics WITH the tones for each syllable? or just without the tones so you can follow the singer?

skylee: how does 美麗 mean "brave"????

[skylee]

Have you ever read Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World"? Its chinese title is 美麗新世界. When I saw the title of the song, the title of this book came to mind.

My Longman dicitionary has this explanation for the word "brave" ->

2. now rare fine (今罕) 美好的: a brave new world 美麗新世界.

[wai ming]

Ferno:

It really depends on your own objectives: whether you just want to learn to sing to your favourite songs, or whether you view learning songs as an opportunity to improve your vocabulary and Chinese generally.

If you just want to learn to sing to your favourite songs, you don't need to learn the tones.

However, if you want to view it as an opportunity to improve your vocabulary and even your speaking and writing generally, I'd suggest learning the tones - and studying the lyrics as you would any other Chinese text. By that I mean learning the correct pronunciation (including tones) and meanings of words and phrases in the lyrics, learning how to write the characters used in the lyrics, and even using the lyrics to get used to Chinese sentence structures.

[Desmond]

My plan is both actually. My priority is learning the language, so what I have been doing is listening to songs which have lyrics on the web (characters, pinyin, and English translation)

Then I break down each line of the song, figure out each character and put it on a flashcard, as well as pinyin and tones. Then I try to figure out the meaning of the sentence and compare it to the English translation. Then I listen to the song in pieces and try to make sure I hear and can understand everything (like I can do with English songs).

But overall it's more fun than analyzing and memorizing a dialogue from a text, cause afterwards I can listen to the song and sing with it!

Does this work well for a lot of people? It's seeming to work well for me, better than just straight up flash cards with no dialogue.

I've been thinking.... and i know this is daring and maybe my level isn't high enough yet, but picking a movie (one that's not too hard hopefully, with good pronunciation etc) and breaking down the _entire_ movie. Just like I'm doing to these songs.....

Advisable? Not advisable? I welcome your opinions

[Ferno]

Well Desmond, keep in mind that due to the tone issues and music being more of an art-like/metaphorical thing, the Chinese used in music will often be different than the Chinese used in casual speech. And certain constructs would only be used in music, etc...

I'm sure someone can corroberate this?

But you would certainly learn a lot regardless. I don't know how strong your attention span/motivation is, but one of the biggest obstacles for learning Chinese is... maintaining interest. Even though hitting the books/tapes might be the best way to learn a language, it won't help you if you get so bored that you quit or you block the information out. If you analyze song lyrics because you enjoy it, then by nature you will retain a lot of the information, that's how our brains work

[Ferno]

Have you ever read Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World"? Its chinese title is 美麗新世界. When I saw the title of the song' date=' the title of this book came to mind.

My Longman dicitionary has this explanation for the word "brave" ->

2. now rare fine (今罕) 美好的: a brave new world 美麗新世界.

Wow now I'm really confused. I know Chinese is highly context-sensitive, but I didn't know you had to use context to differentiate between different possible meanings of double- syllable adjectives. I can't even see any hints for context here, what if you never saw the Chinese translation of Huxley's book?

Or am I misunderstanding this? How would someone say "Beautiful new world", then?

[gougou]

I know Chinese is highly context-sensitive, but I didn't know you had to use context to differentiate between different possible meanings of double- syllable adjectives.

But that's the same as distinguishing between several meanings for English words, e.g. brave

[Ferno]

The second and third definitions of brave are uncommon, the colorful one is not even listed as a primary one in (http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=brave). The definitions are similar enough to be figured out anyway, conveying the idea of "strength" "perseverence".."in the face of danger", especially understanding that non-living things do not have courage.

Brave and beautiful, however, have completely different meanings.