Dragonzakura (the jdrama) has some odd ideas on how to study for Toudai. For English, the teacher uses songs to teach the students English words and their uses.

Obviously, this method has flaws and could never be used by itself.

But what about as an add-on? My highschool Spanish class forced us to memorize a few songs and I still remember most of them to this day! It's just about the only thing I -do- remember from the class.

So I got to thinking, what if I took songs like the first OP and second ED from Keroro Gunsou and memorized them, and learned to sing them along with the show? Keroro is particularly good because the songs are pretty random. It goes from talking about conquest (on topic) to forgetting to cook the rice for the curry, etc. And the ED talks about things like 'every time I take out my umbrella, the sky is clear.'

I've seen other topics that ask about learning from music, but when I saw them, I always thought 'The singing never sounds like spoken Japanese... It's always accented funny.' But Keroro's songs don't seem to be like that... They're drawn out a bit for the song, but they don't pronounce the su loudly in 'desu' and stuff like that. I even found a blog on the net that linked to a bunch of children's songs.

http://www.goddesscarlie.com/language/ja...es-online/

Thoughts?

Ok, you cannot learn with japanese songs to pronounce japanese.

But I think it is a good way to learn grammar.

My biggest problem is, I find no song I want to hear and learn. For the songs I found nice, I have no grammar explanations or translations.

The link from you ist nice, but the singer is bad. :-(

I've found that songs are a good way to learn some vocab. Memorize the lyrics, learn the meaning of the words you don't know, and then boom -- you've got yourself a catchy, entertaining SRS (if you will...) Every time you listen to the song, you review.

The downside is that, I've found that I only learn a few words per song.
Granted, I've never gone out of my way and "studied" songs...but when I come across a line where a words just "sticks out," I tend to remember it.

So yes, songs are a good way to pick up some vocab here and there.
Grammar - Lyrics don't always follow grammar. There's sentence fragments, "implied" things left out, and things.
Pronunciation: probably not.
隣のトトロ：　「魔法の扉あきますううううううううううう」
As opposed to "akimass" so to speak...

Teskal Wrote:But I think it is a good way to learn grammar.

I think it's not the greatest because songs often have a very loose structure. Not always but listen to enough and you can see what I mean. That and often they can be kinda poetic in nature.

Anyways how I'm learning them to use now is:

I got the lyrics to my favourite songs (well as many as I could find). My plan is (when finished my kanken prep) to read through 10 songs a day and Anki every single word I don't know to prime me for them when I hear them in the song. I did it with 10 songs already and it works very well. Now all of a sudden i'm actually hearing all these new words in the songs and my understanding and enjoyment of the music has increased.

I don't know if I'd quite recommend it to a total beginner but it seems to be working VERY well to harvest vocab and then have it activated through listening to good songs I'm at a point where I understand quite a lot of music but feel I have a very patchy understanding of an equal amount. This will change that.

I only managed to get lyrics to 130/240 of my favourite songs and I have like 1200 songs in total. I'll try really heard to get the other half of the lyrics because it will help me out big time. I did some rough estimates based on a few counts and I could be looking at 1000 unknown vocab lurking in the 130 songs alone.

I also noticed that the words I didn't understand we're often rarer in nature and were the words that at times made the lyrics a little poetic, or sometimes just verbs that I hadn't encountered yet. Still... it's a pretty solid idea if you like music and listen to it a lot.