Is it a good idea to study beginner japanese through songs?

4 comments

1. If your goal is general Japanese ability rather than something specifically connected to songs, then yeah I’d honestly say it’s a bad idea as a beginner.

   Even aside from the deliberate solecisms that are everywhere in songs, the lyrical content is often just as weird (vague, symbolic, borderline meaningless, etc.), and the pronunciation is often [equally unnatural](https://www.vice.com/en/article/pkyqkv/cursive-singing-tiktok-trend-explained).

   It’s maybe a silly example but that famous viral rap lyric [“*Interior crocodile alligator, I drive a Chevrolet movie theater*”](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZwhNFOn4ik) perfectly demonstrates all of these phenomena, right down to ‘theater’ being unnaturally pronounced to fit the rhyme.

2. >because lyrics doesn’t follow good grammar

   There are many problems with learning through (only) songs, including the fact that the grammar and vocab used isn’t what would be used in conversation, but make no mistake: Unless someone was trying to be rebellious by not giving a fuck about the words coming out of their mouth, the grammar is usually just fine unless they throw in some gratuitous English in there even though the songwriter might not have a good grasp of it, just to be fancy. What makes songs not fine for conversation is that many songs try to be poetic whereas most conversationalists do not.

   If you do want to continue looking into song lyrics as learning opportunities, you should balance it out with other conversational (or at least non-poetic) communication. One of the skills I developed early on because of studying song lyrics was learning to interpret chunks of information as they come. Say someone sang a very long and complex sentence as a verse. Since most people don’t just spit out verses in one breath continuous breath, so the long sentence has to be broken down into smaller parts that make sense in terms of flow — both in terms of the music’s meter and presentation of ideas through the words. Building up a tolerance for long sentences this way made it less scary to practice active listening to actual natural conversational speech.

   One example I can recall for breaking long sentences into smaller chunks that actually makes sense is the opening lines to [世界が終わるまでは…](https://youtu.be/JPNl9SUqIdU). The sentence “大都会に僕はもう一人で投げ捨てられた空き缶のようだ” as “大都会に　僕はもう一人で　投げ捨てられた　空き缶のようだ.” The melody and the sentence fragments break off where it makes sense.

3. [Why it is a bad idea to learn Japanese by studying song lyrics](https://morg.systems/Learning-Japanese-by-studying-song-lyrics)

4. I’d say wait until you’re a higher level and can distinguish when it’s weirdly written or poetic. Really you are better off reading stuff that’s tailored to your level and power through to n3 then come back when you have the fundamental grammar under your belt.