Learn Japanese Today

In accordance with the whole new Sunday Sing-Along idea, I thought you all should be made more aware of the best way to convert songs into knowledge.

Alright, first things first. Listen to the song a couple of times. Don’t look at the lyrics yet, they don’t matter. Just listen to the song a couple of times and try to figure out what it’s about. You don’t have to know every word, just figure out the situation.

Why is the singer singing the song? Who is the song to? What’s the purpose of the song?

Once you’ve done that, you can start looking at the lyrics. Use the lyrics to guide you through times when the singer is unclear and you’re not quite sure what they’re saying. It doesn’t matter yet if you don’t know certain words. Look at words you know, then keep trying to figure out what the song is saying.

Think of each verse and chorus as its own chapter in a book. Each of these “chapters” will be about a more specific person, place, thing, or event, while the whole “book” (song) tells a story connecting the chapters. Try to see how that’s done.

Now you can bust out your dictionary. Look up words you don’t know, and if they’re not in there, look up the root word. Then look around on the internet for colloquial conjugations or just try to figure out what it means by context. The words you find in songs are often quite different from the ones you find in textbooks.

Keep looking up words until you understand the song. If you have the time, you can translate it as well. It certainly won’t hurt your Japanese. If you don’t want to translate the whole thing though, you can choose some of the choicer sentences and plug them into your SRS to study later.

Good Luck!