How to Boost Your Mandarin Skills by Learning Through Chinese Songs

Learning Chinese through songs is one of the most fun ways to learn a language. Not only is it a good way to get hooked on language learning, but it also reinforces the sounds, melody, and—in the case of Chinese—tones!

In this article we explore exactly how you should learn Chinese with song in a way that's fun, effective, and appropriate for your level.

Before you start

If you haven't already formed some kind of foundation, then we would recommend that you learn Pinyin before trying to learn from songs. Pinyin is a standardized way to write in the Latin alphabet with sound correspondences to Mandarin. If you don't know any Pinyin, then it's going to hard to hear and properly produce the sounds. We have made a detailed Mandarin fundamentals course that covers everything you need to get started learning Chinese.

If you want a very quick rundown then you can check out this explainer video.

Learning from songs as a beginner

If you're just getting started, then we recommend going through these playlists. They walk you through lyrics step-by-step. This video series are very useful because they break everything down, include lots of slow repetition, have helpful explanations of what's going on, and include both Pinyin and characters.

Learn Chinese through Songs Playlist by Andy and Sarah Mandarin

Link

This playlist will play a line from a song before diving into an in-depth explanation. They break down the grammar, show you the Pinyin, and provide translations for the terms.

SyS Mandarin

Link

This playlist is similar to the above, but the audio quality and general production value is lower. It's still a very useful breakdown of songs, in a similar style to the above playlist.

Take your learning to the next level

If you really want to get serious with learning from songs then you need to find selectable text lyrics. This is because text that you can actually copy/paste will make it much easier to look up words in a dictionary. Let's look at where you find selectable text as well as find music that is relevant whenever you happen to find this article.

Where to get lyrics

Spotify Top 50
Available Regions: China, Taiwan, Singapore

Apple Music Top 100
Available Regions: China, Taiwan, Singapore

Shazam Top 200
Available Regions: China, Singapore

KKBox
Link: Example song

This website is not available in English. It's for a music streaming service in Taiwan, but it is very useful for finding lyrics. You can search in Chinese or English, and then you can find the full, selectable-text lyrics for many songs.

Active Learning

There are many ways to learn from song lyrics, but some ways are better than others. While you could simply listen to the song and follow along with the lyrics, that routine is likely not going to be very fruitful. This is because your level of engagement is low, you aren't looking up unknown words, and you aren't saving information later for review.

Let's take you through different options that you have available to you besides simply listening to songs, in increasing order of effectiveness.

Level 1 - Online Dictionaries

Once you have chosen a song and obtained the corresponding lyrics, you can follow along with the song, pause when you want to look something up, and then copy and paste that into a dictionary.

There are 2 problems with this method:

As a learner, there are a ton of words that you won't know, which means there are a ton of words that you have to lookup. Having to copy, switch tabs, and paste every time can make for a painful experience.

Secondly, this method simply relies on getting raw exposure, which isn't bad, but it isn't ideal either.

Level 2 - Pop-up Dictionaries

Pop-up dictionaries are a level up from online dictionaries because they are faster. A pop-up dictionary is a piece of software (usually a Chrome extension) that allows you to hover or click on a word and get a pop-up with several meanings as well as the pronunciation.

This makes looking up words quick and effortless, allowing you to get through a lot more lyrics.

Level 3 - Migaku

Lastly, we have Migaku. The Migaku Chrome extension can add Pinyin above the characters and allow you to look up a word with a click or by hovering and pressing shift.

Migaku let's you customize the pop-up dictionary to your liking by adding extra dictionaries. You also get access to how frequent a particular word is.

Not only that, but you can create a flashcard from the song lyric instantly. This can automatically add the lyric the word was in, an image, a translation, a ChatGPT explanation and more. The icing on the cake is that this is integrated with its own cross-platform review system, so that you can learn on-the-go.

As a final point, Migaku let's you track the words you know. This way you can stay motivated as well as unlock features like showing the pronunciation only on those characters that you don't know.

Conclusion

And that wraps up the key dictionary resources for Mandarin Chinese. If you're looking for a comprehensive approach for learning Chinese from the basics all the way to fluency, we recommend you check out our Mandarin courses and software. Our courses have simple progression of grammar points with native audio, that is integrated with our software, dictionaries, and other functionality, which is cross-platform. You can start your free trial today!