🎵 Learning Languages With Music
How I Use Song Lyrics to Learn Vocab in My Target Languages
🎵 Listening to Music in Your Target Language
I’ve heard arguments about the usefulness of learning a language with music. If all you’re doing is listening to music, I doubt your language skills would improve much. However, songs can be a way to get exposed to the sounds of a language. The same words and phrases are often repeated throughout a song. Furthermore, you are more likely to replay a song you like, giving you more exposure to the words and sounds in that song and language.
What are your thoughts about learning a language with music?
🎶 What Type of Songs Should You Learn Your TL With?
In my opinion, it’s more important to use a song that you enjoy rather than a song that is “easy”. You’ll find yourself humming along to songs you like so it only makes sense to learn the lyrics of those songs. However, as you may know, not all lyrics in songs make sense. Lines in songs do not reflect the ways people talk and communicate with one another. This is why I focus more on learning new words and increasing my vocab when learning a language with song lyrics.
📻 Resources To Use When Translating Song Lyrics
A dictionary for your TL
Pleco (Mandarin, Cantonese)
Where To Listen To Music in Your TL
YouTube, Spotify and other music streaming sites
StreetVoice (街聲) - A Taiwanese music platform for indie artists
🎙️ How Do I Learn My TL With Song Lyrics?
After choosing a song, I start by getting a PDF of the song lyrics or writing the song lyrics out myself. For Mandarin, I usually use a typed version of the song lyrics while for French and Icelandic, I’ve written out the lyrics.
As I mentioned earlier, I use song lyrics as a tool to learn new words. I do attempt to translate but I’m not too concerned with getting an accurate translation. Songs can be weird and half the time I barely understand English songs.
Your vocabulary size and general understanding of a language will influence how you go about using a song to learn your TL. For example, you may only be encountering new words in a song if it is a language you are at a higher level in. For languages you are a beginner in, lyrics may be difficult to understand due to having a small vocabulary size or a limited understanding of grammar.
I will explain how I learn my TLs with song lyrics by giving my experience with 3 of my TLs, Mandarin, French and Icelandic.
🎤 Mandarin
I mostly use YouTube or StreetVoice to listen to songs in Mandarin. Streetvoice is great as the majority of the songs have lyrics listed to read while listening. Since I’m lazy, I usually copy and paste the lyrics into a doc and convert it to a PDF file. I then use that PDF file on my tablet to highlight or underline new words and write their definitions.
To save space I sometimes underline new words and create a list with the pronunciation on the right side along with the definition. Learning the characters I don’t yet know means that I can follow along when I listen to the song.
If I highlight instead of underlining, I use yellow for new words and pink for words I’m familiar with.
Mandarin Song Recommendations
阿肆 A SI
I wrote a short article about this song in Issue 4 of Path to Chinese
Honourable mentions not everyone may like
🎤 French
Writing in French isn’t as time-consuming as in Mandarin so I take my time to write out lyrics before highlighting new words. Since I can usually figure out the meaning of a word, especially if it is similar to English, I focus on the words that are completely new to me. I also take note of phrases that are commonly said.
I write the lyrics on the left side of the page and my English translation on the right side. I used the French dictionary on Word Reference to help me understand the lyrics.
🎤 Icelandic
My method with Icelandic is similar to French. I write out the lyrics and go through them to find new words. Since Icelandic is my newest language, most words in the lyrics are new to me. Thus, learning Icelandic from song lyrics is quite intensive.
If the song is a new song to me like Ásgeir Trausti - Hærra was, I listen to the song while writing the lyrics. Once I’m done going through the lyrics, I read along as I listen. Usually, the sounds become more comprehensible after going through the lyrics.
As you can see I have a lot of highlights, definitions and explanations of words.
Icelandic Song Recommendations
I hope you enjoyed reading this post. If you do check out any of my song recommendations, let me know if you liked them! Feel free to share song recommendations in my TLs (Mandarin, Japanese, French, Cantonese & Icelandic). I’m always looking for more songs to listen to.
What is your favourite song in your TL?
Thanks for reading!
Thank you for the recommendations, I've never listened to Chinese music before! I'll check them out 😊