When I started this site, I called it lyrical Chinese because my intention was to help people learn Chinese by listening to music.  Its a technique that has worked well for me and I want to share it.

Yesterday, I posted a set of lyrics from a Jay Chou song – 听妈妈的话 – “Listen to what your mother says.”  Jay Chou is very popular in China and as I remember, this song was quite popular.  I have included a link to to buy it on Amazon.  You can download the track for $0.99.  (At some point, the link may be an affiliate link for which I get a commission.  If it bothers you that I might make some money off it, just go search it on Amazon.)

Try listening to the song and following along.  You probably need to know at least 100 characters before this will work.  But if you know 100-200 characters, you will probably be ably to keep your self in sync with the lyrics.

There are a few things you will need to learn here.  At the beginning of the lyrics are two lines:
作词：周杰伦
作曲：周杰伦
You need to know 作 – which means to do or to make.  You also need to know 词 and 曲.    词 refers to the words and 曲 refers to the music. So 作词 is the person who wrote the words and 作曲 is the person who wrote the music.  周杰伦 is Jay Chou’s name in Chinese.  You won’t hear these two lines in the song, because they aren’t part of the song.  They simply indicate that the words and the music were both written by Jay Chou.

Another word you’ll probably want to learn is 歌词.   歌 means song and 词 as you saw above means words or lyrics.  so 歌词 means the song lyrics.   If you roughly know the title of a song, or even a few characters from a line from the song, if you use Google to search for those and add  歌词 to the search, you will likely find the lyrics to the song.

So, for example, try a Google search for “听妈妈的话 歌词” and you will probably find the lyrics that I have provided in my previous post.

If you have a market or store near you that sells Chinese CD’s, you can buy them, look up the lyrics and practice by listening and reading the lyrics.  This will help you learn lots of words easily.   If not, I will be posting links to songs and the lyrics for them, and you can download them and listen while using the lyrics I provide.