When do you start learning Japanese kanji/vocabulary from songs?

4 comments

1. I don’t think most specifically engage with music as a means of vocabulary acquisition.

2. It’s hard to say cause I’ve learned some vocab through song then seen them with context on how they’re actually used in sentences

3. I personally make a point never to learn vocabulary from songs. The usage is often quite odd or antiquated (even the readings they choose). I use songs to relax and check my understanding of words I *already* know. The bulk of my acquisition comes from narrative-form content like novels or visual novels.

4. I actually learned to sing a long with a few of my favorite anime openings even before learning the language, by memorizing the romaji version of the lyrics.

   Nowadays I like to use YouTube Music. When you have the song playing, there’s an option to bring up the lyrics of the song to sing a long with, if it’s available.

   You may not understand everything at first. Some parts of the song will be too fast for you or hard to make out. That’s okay. You could understand perhaps one word, or just try to match the song with the Kana you recognize in the lyrics. You could even set yourself the goal of looking up the Kanji/Vocab for one verse.

   What I personally like to do, is come back from time to time, while learning with different apps, websites, YouTube videos, books and video games and see how much more I’m able to understand now. It’s kind of like an Open World game, where you might discover some areas in your starting zone that you can’t access yet because you’ll only find the proper tool to do so later, and when you come back, you’ll have a bunch of lopt or secrets to discover 🙂