Learning Chinese With Mandopop: How to Use Songs

Chinese songs are a good way to meet vocabulary and feelings in memorable lines, and a poor way to learn tones. Treat a song as a short reading and listening text with a tune attached. Read the lyrics first, look up what you do not know, listen with the text, and then sing along if you like. Take your pronunciation of tones from speech, because in singing the melody sets the pitch.

For learners of Taiwanese Mandarin there is a bonus: a large share of well-known Mandopop comes from Taiwan, so the lyrics are often in Traditional characters.

Taiwan’s Place in Mandopop

Mandopop means Mandarin-language pop music. Taiwan has long been one of its main centres, and many of the best-known Mandarin-language singers and bands are from Taiwan. Teresa Teng (鄧麗君, Dèng Lìjūn) is one of the best-known voices in Mandarin pop, and her song 月亮代表我的心 (yuèliàng dàibiǎo wǒ de xīn, “the moon represents my heart”) is among the most widely known Mandarin songs. Singers such as Jay Chou (周杰倫, Zhōu Jiélún), Jolin Tsai (蔡依林, Cài Yīlín) and the band Mayday (五月天, Wǔyuètiān) are from Taiwan, and Hebe Tien (田馥甄, Tián Fùzhēn) is another widely known Taiwanese singer.

That matters for two reasons. First, lyrics written in Taiwan are usually in Traditional characters, which is the script you are learning. Second, many of these singers perform in the Mandarin of Taiwan, so the songs fit alongside the Taiwanese audio in your lessons. Lyric websites often show Simplified text, so search for the song with its Traditional title and check which version you are reading.

How Melody Overrides Tones

Mandarin words have tones, and a spoken sentence rises and falls with them. In a song, the melody sets the pitch of each note, and the tones of the words only loosely shape it. A word that is falling in speech may be sung on a rising note.

Listeners still understand because they know the song, the context, and the phrase from the words around it. A learner has less to lean on, which is why song lyrics can sound ambiguous. Two practical consequences follow.

• Do not copy the tone of a sung syllable into your speech.
• If a lyric is unclear, look at the written text and the pinyin or Zhuyin from a dictionary, not at what the sung pitch seems to say.

Some sung vowels are also stretched. A syllable held for several beats may sound different from the spoken version. Rely on the text for the sounds.

Five Steps to Study a Song

1. Choose the song well. Pick a slow or mid-tempo song with a clear singer. A ballad tends to be easier than a fast rap section. Pick something you like, since you will hear it many times.
2. Get the lyrics in Traditional. Look for the official lyrics with the song, such as an official lyric video or the lyrics shown in a music app, and compare against a second source if a line looks wrong. Read the whole text before you listen.
3. Mark the words you do not know. Look up each one in the dictionary to get the pinyin, Zhuyin and meaning. Mark whether it is everyday vocabulary or poetic language. Poetic words can be fun to know, and they should not take up much of your review time.
4. Listen with the text. Follow the lines as they are sung. Then listen without the text and see how many lines you can follow. This is real listening practice, and a repeat of the routine in our guide to Chinese listening practice.
5. Pick five words or phrases. Add only those to your reviews. A whole song’s vocabulary is too much at once.

If you have a few spare minutes, hum or sing one verse with the lyrics in front of you. It builds the habit of linking the sound to the characters.

Choosing by Level

At the beginner stage, expect to understand little of a song even with the lyrics in front of you, because lyrics use compressed and literary phrasing. That is fine. Choose a song for the pleasure of it and pick out the words you do know, which is a small win that motivates more listening. From the lower intermediate stage, you can follow most lines with a dictionary at hand. A good test is whether you can work through a verse in about ten minutes. If a verse takes much longer, save that song for later and choose a simpler one.

What Lyrics Teach Well, and What They Do Not

Lyrics are good for:

• Set phrases and emotions. Songs repeat key lines, which is useful for remembering them.
• Whole phrases. You hear the syllables of a phrase joined in a fixed, repeatable way.
• Listening practice with a built-in transcript. The lyrics are the transcript.

They are weaker for:

• Everyday vocabulary. Many lyrics concern love, memory and distance, not shopping or work.
• Grammar. Lyrics often shorten sentences or drop words to fit the music.
• Tones. As above.

For that reason, songs fit best as one part of a mix. If you want to build your home environment around Chinese, see our guide to Chinese immersion at home for a way to combine songs with podcasts and reading.

A Note on Lyrics and Copyright

Song lyrics are protected by copyright, and this article quotes only a title and no full lyrics for that reason. Use official sources to read the lyrics of the songs you study, and keep your own notes to the words and phrases you are learning rather than copying whole songs.

Related Reading

• Chinese Immersion at Home: A Practical Setup
• Chinese Listening Practice for Beginners: Where to Start
• Why Can’t I Understand Native Chinese Speakers?