Is music a good source for learning Japanese?

The only real advantage you can get from music as a beginner is reading on the fly by using some karaoke videos or going to a karaoke box. I basically learned to read hiragana (and quite a few kanji!) quickly this way because I like to sing, so I wanted to sing Japanese songs with friends. This was before I even really wanted to commit to learn Japanese too, so it was very motivating for me going into the future.

TL;DR
Sing. Have fun. Don’t worry too much about the meaning.

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I agree with virgilmaro - karaoke is great practice for reading hiragana and kanji on the fly. (It still helps to memorize the song as thoroughly as you can beforehand.) Also, practicing singing helps with stuttering. If you can practice singing through a stuttery word like あたたかい you won’t have as much trouble when you have to produce あたたかい in regular speech for other reasons later.

I did use songs for grammar when I started (I just went word by word using a dictionary). I did misunderstand certain things. I wouldn’t worry about it too much though - if you’re taking a class or working on grammar from other sources separately, you’ll eventually correct yourself. And doing that did quickly teach me what was a particle or grammar construction versus what was a word. tl;dr: Don’t rely on song translation for grammar alone, and hold your best guesses as the grammar lightly. Go back and check your completed work every few months.

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Anything can be a good source of study if you focus on it. No doubt you could pick up expressions and vocabulary from lyrics, and reinforce grammar.

It’s also good for immersion. Prior to the N2, I decided to basically only listen to music in Japanese, watch things in Japanese, etc. Did it make a big difference? I don’t know; maybe. All acclimation is good, even in the most passive ways.

As a major focus though? Eh; probably not. It’s not useless, but it’s also probably not as useful as any other media you could be interacting with (writing, TV, etc.). Lyrics are just too dissimilar from practical expressions, and singing from everyday speech.

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