I’m happy to read an article in Japanese, it’ll probably take me a bit of time but I can usually piece things together. I’ve found lyrics much harder though. Every line isn’t always linked my head starts spinning from what the subject is meant to be. Every time I see a に or は I get a panic attack over the 10 things I could mean. Or maybe some weird conjugation comes up that I can’t seem to look up. It really doesn’t help it’s meant to be cryptic so I don’t have any context of what’s going on.
Some websites try to explain what the lyrics mean, but besides it all being in Japanese and a bit intimidating, I suspect it’s about the song overall rather than who did what to who in that specific line.
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Are you able to listen and understand dialogues and conversations at full speed?
I’ll be impressed if you can deal with that and not songs. Songs were my personal gateway into comprehensible input (specifically [these](https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLBfUpSa74L5Br6iu2U_hG47bpjCWWcCXW), and they’re what helped me learn to process audio information as they come. As you can probably tell from the playlist I linked, the songs I was listening to at the time were mostly slow, in first-person, and basically sounds like someone is telling the listener a story.It also helped that those songs had breaks, either in the musical phrases or the actual verbal phrases that broke up “sentences” into fragments that make enough sense in isolation for me to be able to put the meaning together in my head as I heard it.
Those songs built up on what I already learned through a more conventional way (e.g., after going through Genki), so as a result understanding other songs at a first listen started to require much less effort aside from vocabulary over time.
Lyrics are often very devoid of context, are full of weird meanings, subtext and references. They often require precise understanding of the grammar and cultural knowledge to really understand.
For practicing Japanese I think something with more context as to the meaning is more effective.
Don’t feel bad about the inability to understand songs, poems, or jokes. I’m sure there are other areas that are similar but they all require a level of fluency is very high and widespread and typically not casually learned from teaching methods and instead are more derived from colloquial usage.
The truth is, most learners don’t. Although many people start learning Japanese to understand lyrics, they soon give up on that because of 1) the amount of vagueness, alternative interpretations, sentence clipping, inversions, not to mention the occasional metathesis that goes on in singing; and 2) they get demotivated by the amount of obscure words they come across (songs are notorious for that, especially in Japanese).
It is different because they are a lot of the time more poetic and abstract, so it is not like reading a book. Just like english songs vs books, or whatever language
If its just vocabulary then learning from music is fine, especially if you listen to it often. Grammar as well but be careful some stuff can be wonky on grammar depending on the type of music.