Fun, Essential Chinese Songs to Learn: Supplement Your Lessons (Part I)

Today I'm going to introduce some fun and helpful Chinese songs that you can learn, from beginner to intermediate level. These songs can supplement your Mandarin Chinese progress and make things a bit more fun. In fact, one of my favorite parts of teaching Chinese is introducing songs for my students of all levels to learn and sing. But, first, why would learning songs be helpful in language acquisition?

Learning songs helps make the lessons more fun and gives us a chance to put our language to use. Who knows? Students may end up showing off their skills in a KTV (that's a Chinese karaoke entertainment center!).

There are many reasons to learn songs as you're learning a foreign language:

So, now that we know that learning songs is important, which ones should we learn?

- BEGINNER CHILDREN'S SONGS -
You don't have to be a kid to enjoy these fun songs! Children's songs are not only fun, but also useful and easy to learn. Don't feel self-conscious, join in at all ages!
Here are the four Children's songs in Chinese that I'd recommend all Chinese learners check out:

This surreal song is about two tigers running fast- one with no eyes and the other with no tail. Certainly unforgettable!

This cheerful song introduces some locations and verbs related to growing and giving.

This song is a plea from a child for more love from mom and dad. There are many helpful verbs and language about love and caring for one another.

The story of an ambitious and confident growing frog that travels the world jumping across oceans! Wanna check out more beautiful songs for Chinese learning? Click Here

With the onset of the internet, Chinese is also changing and growing its vocabulary. If you want to know Chinese that is most relevant to today, it's important that you keep up with Chinese Internet Slang that we use on a daily basis, whether we're commenting on a news post or messaging over WeChat!

But the thing about the internet and its unique language, especially in Chinese is that it has a dark side to it. It's not all sunshine out there on social media in English and in Chinese. Often people suffer from vicious online attacks. As I'm sure you know if you have a social media account--people can be really mean as well as really nice.

As every user of the internet knows, being online has its positives and negatives.

And especially if you're famous, there are more negative comments, Facebook posts, Twitter updates, Instagram comments than positive ones.

Have you ever just lost it and unloaded your negativity online? You're not the only one.

None of us is perfect, and occasionally we just want to mock our opponent. Since we spend so much time online, it's hard to keep perfect behavior.

So when you're conversing in Chinese online it's important to know the negative words as well as the positive ones.

炮轰 (pàohōng) is one negative word that describes those vicious online attacks that often happen to celebrities or politicians.

It seems like it's everyday that some star, celebrity or politician is 炮轰 (pàohōng) bombarded online because of some kind of negative news. And we often don't know if this negative gossip is just that gossip. Or if there's actual truth to the articles we read. No matter what, when you're reading online in Chinese you want to know exactly what 炮轰 (pàohōng) means.

Let's break this word down more to …Read more

Quiz:

A. To gossip.
B. To bomb.
C. To censure.
See Answer