I memorized Japanese song lyrics to help with learning vocab and stuff, but it was mostly just for fun. It was a great way to supplement my studying in a way that was interesting to me, but it was really just a side thing. If you don’t have a solid foundation of study, it’ll be hard to pick up anything useful from more conventional sources of vocabulary practice, let alone from a song.
I 100 percent think that, if you like Japanese music, then learning/translating songs is a great way to practice. But it won’t be very helpful unless you properly study as well. (Plus a lot of the words you will end up learning won’t be very useful in the day-to-day.)
Songs have a tremendous variety of words, so if you’re looking for new words to learn, you definitely won’t run out.
That said, songs often use more artistic or dramatic words that are uncommon in daily life. They might use less common or made-up reading/kanji combinations. So they might not necessarily be good for learning everyday Japanese.
But if you really enjoy songs and that motivates you to study more, I’d say go for it. Motivation and fun are important too.
2 comments
I memorized Japanese song lyrics to help with learning vocab and stuff, but it was mostly just for fun. It was a great way to supplement my studying in a way that was interesting to me, but it was really just a side thing. If you don’t have a solid foundation of study, it’ll be hard to pick up anything useful from more conventional sources of vocabulary practice, let alone from a song.
I 100 percent think that, if you like Japanese music, then learning/translating songs is a great way to practice. But it won’t be very helpful unless you properly study as well. (Plus a lot of the words you will end up learning won’t be very useful in the day-to-day.)
Songs have a tremendous variety of words, so if you’re looking for new words to learn, you definitely won’t run out.
That said, songs often use more artistic or dramatic words that are uncommon in daily life. They might use less common or made-up reading/kanji combinations. So they might not necessarily be good for learning everyday Japanese.
But if you really enjoy songs and that motivates you to study more, I’d say go for it. Motivation and fun are important too.