I usually like to listen to music whilst I study Chinese.
I like to listen to commercial dance music/pop music as I find that it aids motivation and concentration. I can play this happily in the background and concentrate easily.
Someone advised me that I should listen to this music in Chinese whilst I study. I think that they were applying the Taiwanese idea that listening to ICRT will help to improve ones English ability.
So I tried for a few hours but I just couldn’t get my head into gear. The music proved to be a distraction and I ended up turning it off and studying in silence.
I would like to get more exposure to Chinese music as I am a big music lover. However my experience has proved that I am not able to listen to Chinese music as background music like I can with English music. I have to be 100% focused on listening to the music if I am going to listen.
Has anyone else encountered this?
Does anyone have any ideas why this occurs?
I am not a linguist but I was thinking that the issue is related to my lack of vocabulary.
My general feeling is that listening to music in Chinese has little value towards improving your Chinese ability. It’s very difficult for me to understand all a song unless I listen to it multiple times or have already read the lyrics, and most Taiwanese I know (who, granted, aren’t exactly 歌迷) say the same thing. This is probably something you can improve with practice, but I’m not sure what the point would be, unless you really love Chinese/Taiwanese pop music to begin with, in which case by all means go for it. Learn by doing what you love.
I’m not a linguist either, but I would guess that it has to do with you hearing things that you almost recognize but not quite. Your brain wants to figure out what’s going on. If it were in Swahili, it would just sound like noise to you, and if it were in English you wouldn’t have to expend any effort at all.
I doubt it’s a vocabulary problem unless you’re at a beginning level; the range of topics in Chinese-language “commercial dance/pop music” is very narrow indeed. Don’t blame yourself, it’s just the nature of a tonal language made to conform to the diatonic scale.
Personally my problem isn’t that I can’t leave it in the background, it’s that it makes me fall asleep.
I listen to chinese music constantly, mostly stuff I have found by listening to Taiwan radio stations.
I find it good to listen to while studying as I am so sick of the same old stock standard music coming out of America, Australia, etc…
I feel that as a result of so many listening hours, probably in the thousands so far, my ability to pick out exactly what syllables are being spoken has improved dramatically.
I woud definitely recommend listening to as much chinese input as you can, because I feel that it has certainly improved my ability to pick words out of sentences.
However I do agree, trying to use modern/pop music to learn words themselves is difficult if you are a beginner because you will know very few of the words, and much of the language is “poetic” and will probably not make sense even if you understand the words.
I simply can’t listen to music when doing word-related study (reading, writing, practicing characters, etc.). It interferes with my mental word processing.
But I can listen to music when doing numerical study (math, calculation, etc.).
I LOVE to listen Chinese music while learning Chinese. Especially when I write characters. It doesn’t bother me at all, it kind of gives me more motivation.
And for me, listening Chinese music, has helped improve my Chinese ! Okay, this and watching Taiwanese dramas …
I tried this… but I found it gave me a headache.
More because I think Japanese/Chinese/Korean pop music sounds like a bunch of girls high on helium squeaking through a barrage of electronic mind-numbing/mind-raping beats.
[quote=“Lili”]I tried this… but I found it gave me a headache.
More because I think Japanese/Chinese/Korean pop music sounds like a bunch of girls high on helium squeaking through a barrage of electronic mind-numbing/mind-raping beats.[/quote]
I suspect you just don’t know how to find good chinese music. I prefer my chinese music over my western music as there is available so many more artists/bands that have much higher competence and skill level at using real instruments that they can make some truly amazing music.
One thing is listening to Chinese as a learning tool -and doing karaoke, I’m afraid- which helps as long as it is enjoyable. However, I agre with OP that doing stuff in target language while listening to music in target language generates a headache and nothing more. I can’t work like that, I write in Spanish and listen to English/Chinese. I can’t listen to songs in Spanish while translating/editing. I think that the RAM at the language function brain center has a limit.
[quote=“pqkdzrwt”][quote=“Lili”]I tried this… but I found it gave me a headache.
More because I think Japanese/Chinese/Korean pop music sounds like a bunch of girls high on helium squeaking through a barrage of electronic mind-numbing/mind-raping beats.[/quote]
I suspect you just don’t know how to find good chinese music. I prefer my chinese music over my western music as there is available so many more artists/bands that have much higher competence and skill level at using real instruments that they can make some truly amazing music.
[quote=“Lili”]I tried this… but I found it gave me a headache.
More because I think Japanese/Chinese/Korean pop music sounds like a bunch of girls high on helium squeaking through a barrage of electronic mind-numbing/mind-raping beats.[/quote]
Man, I wish Chinese/Taiwanese pop music had numbing/mind-raping beats. Or any beats at all worth noticing, really.
I like 丁薇, if you’re looking for something with more substance.
There is a live music venu in Taibei called “The Wall”, it also has a CD shop where it sells the CD’s of the live artists that often play there. Some of them are quite crap, but others I quite like (:
Quite a few CD’s from here are on my regular playlists.
…is an amateur linguist. Most music is good because…
[ul]
[li]You can control the WPM rate by picking different genres. I listen to music genres in the following order: ballads and R&B, hip-hop, rap, really fast rap.[/li]
[li]Music uses a fairly limited lexicon (because much of it must rhymes and have good meter), so you’re getting more time to exercise your knowledge with syntax.[/li]
[li]Every time you hear something, you make a copy of it in your brain.[/li]
[li]Recall of vocabulary through song lyrics is faster than straight recall, as are many other associative devices (that learning by doing what you love in the language).[/li]
[li]You gradually learn to differentiate subtler and subtler phonetics with increased repetition. There was awesome research done on this with Japanese people learning to separate /l/ and /r/![/li][/ul]
However, brains don’t exactly want to figure out what’s going on. People have a greater habit of tuning out what they don’t understand than listening harder to get it. Actually learning the lyrics and singing along takes a different kind of initiative, and it always felt more like straightforward study to me.
Unfortunately, I just don’t like [the] Chinese music [that I’ve heard thus far]. I laugh too hard at the Chinese hip-hop and rap that’s on the radio here.
[quote=“odysseyandoracle”][quote=“Lili”]I tried this… but I found it gave me a headache.
More because I think Japanese/Chinese/Korean pop music sounds like a bunch of girls high on helium squeaking through a barrage of electronic mind-numbing/mind-raping beats.[/quote]
Man, I wish Chinese/Taiwanese pop music had numbing/mind-raping beats. Or any beats at all worth noticing, really.
I like 丁薇, if you’re looking for something with more substance.[/quote]
This song reminds me a mix of Linkin Park and Evanescence. :bravo:
Is this song popular in Taiwan ? youtube.com/watch?v=jAW7Xaidc7E :discodance:
[quote=“Milkybar_Kid”]So I tried for a few hours but I just couldn’t get my head into gear. The music proved to be a distraction and I ended up turning it off and studying in silence.
I would like to get more exposure to Chinese music as I am a big music lover. However my experience has proved that I am not able to listen to Chinese music as background music like I can with English music. I have to be 100% focused on listening to the music if I am going to listen.[/quote]
Then why not take some time to make understanding Chinese song lyrics the focus of your study, if you’re such a music lover and 100% focused on listening to the music?
I get distracted by Latin music, but just because I like it. I work best in dead silence and solitude.
I hate Taiwanese music, which is disappointing, because I learned a lot of Spanish initially by listening to cumbia, Spanish rap, and merengue music.
There’s most likely study on this, but probably where it relates to simultaneous interpretation.
You could start here. Their results support your hypothesis.
Listening to Chinese Music is a good way to study Chinese.
Here is an article about how to learn Chinese through Chinese songs, you could read it. onlinechineselearning.com/re … songs.html
OMG! I do the same thing with Japanese!
For Chinese, the only Chinese songs I listen to is Yi Jian Mei (the xue hua piao piao) song and My New Swag by Vava (one of the soundtracks for Crazy Rich Asians)
Anyway, for me listening to Chinese music did help with picking up a log of grammar rules (was able to understand the 把 use case by listening to a 謝天笑 lol).
Also, I found it pretty efficient in helping me to learn specific vocabulary from songs I like as it is easy to get it stuck in your head and recite it over and over with a melody. Much easier than trying to “memorize” words without context.
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