Hi  Everyone,

This morning as I was driving to work and trying to improve my Mandarin (Chinese). I was listening to some of my favourite Taiwanese Pop songs (really!). I love music and find this to be an excellent way to help me practise the language.

As we all know vocabulary needs to be revised again and again. One fun, relaxed and enjoyable way of doing this it is to listen to your favourite songs.

Start by reading the lyrics first to try and understand them. A good way of finding out what the lyrics are is to go to http://www.songlyrics.com/. Remember, the first few times you listen to the song you don’t have to translate the lyrics word by word, just try to work out the general gist (what  the song is about.) Think about the type of songs you like and at the start pick a song which is reasonably easy to understand. Hardcore rap music may not be the best first choice as there tends to be a lot of slang in them. 🙂

Once  you’ve listened to the song a few time choose some words or phrases from the song that you would like to learn. If the song has a chorus (the part of the song that is repeated you could choose that part to learn as you will get lots of practise in the one song.) If necessary, look up the meaning in  your dictionary and note them down in your learning diary.

Now, to the fun part!  To learn the vocabulary, all you have to do is listen to the song again and again (that shouldn’t be a problem if it’s one of your favourite songs).

Good luck everyone… and if you see me singing away in my car, you’ll know that i’m not crazy, but am studying hard!