Can you learn Japanese with music?

April 5, 2025

Learning Japanese is fun. So is listening to Japanese music.

And every now and then, I see questions from fellow learners interested in learning from the Japanese music they listen to. But they try, and it’s… not easy. Usually that leads to a thought like this:

"Is it even possible to learn Japanese from music?"

But thankfully, the answer is yes, it is indeed possible ^^

We can learn from Japanese music no matter what our level is, and there are so many ways to approach it. It just might look a bit different than we might expect it to.

We’ll talk about these different approaches below, so if you're interested in learning from music, you should definitely give it a try! And if you have tried and felt it was too tough, I'd encourage you to try again and experiment to see what works best for you where you are~

Music is simply another type of native material, and this is great news for us. Native materials are one of the three things we need to reach a high level of Japanese proficiency. (The other two being a quality, preferably comprehensive study resource, and then patience & consistency.)

These three things we need are all at our fingertips as well:

Native materials guide ↓

How to learn Japanese with native materials
(We'll talk about music specifically below!)

Quality, comprehensive study resource ↓

If you haven't started your learning journey yet, you'll need your account first! You can make one for free here:

Showing up consistently, being kind to yourself ↓

Patience and consistency (Japanese Essentials Guide)

Learning Japanese from music

I'll be honest. I've often found music to be one of the most challenging native materials to learn from. On the other hand, I've also found it to be one of the most fun.

It's challenging because it can be so fast and full of pretty specific language. Just understanding a single line can take so much time and effort, especially at the start. But it's fun because…

Well, you probably don't need me to tell you that one ^^

Anyway, how do we learn from music?

Passive listening

Passive listening is when you just let the music play without focusing too much on it. You don't try too hard to catch the meaning, and you're probably multitasking with it on in the background.

If you're at the start of your journey, listening more passively can be great for getting your ears used to the sounds of Japanese and figuring out where words start and end (even if you don't understand them yet). With time, the lyrics start to sound less and less like just noise or gibberish.

Once we get more comfortable with that, we can try to pick out words we know. We don't have to go crazy with it. Anything is fine, especially at the beginning. Some common words in songs are…

大丈夫だいじょうぶ (daijoubu // fine; okay)
僕ぼく (boku // I [masculine, but commonly used by females as well in songs])
君きみ (kimi // you [careful with this one outside of songs!])
これ (kore // this)
それ (sore // that)
いい (ii // good)
本当ほんとう (hontou // really)

You can also listen for conjugations that you might know. Verbs like する (suru // to do) and 思おもう (omou // to think) will definitely be conjugated throughout many songs.

All of this can be done at any level of Japanese. We can zone in and out and catch what we catch while missing what we miss. Don’t worry about how much you catch or miss here. Either way, our brains are making notes for us while we do it. And naturally, we'll just keep catching more words the more we progress in our studies.

Active listening

Active listening is when we give the music our full attention. It's when we try our best to understand it just a bit more than before we actively study it.

This can take a lot of brain power. Especially at the start. Instead of trying to do a whole song, it’s probably best to start with a single line a day and work your way up from there.

Whatever keeps you learning at a comfortable pace!

Quality of studies and trying to understand as much as possible is great, of course, but there is a limit to this. If we're getting stressed during our studies because we can't understand something, then maybe we're simply trying to do too much in too short a time.

Going a little easier on ourselves can go a surprisingly long way. The more fun your studies are, the more you'll improve in the long run because there's less of a risk of burnout!

Anyway, for active studies, it might be nice to fully/mostly pay attention to a song or two a day and just really try to see how much you can understand, then listen again to see if you can understand more each listen. You might also play with rewinding certain pieces you find difficult to catch. This can be a great way to train our ears ^^

Optionally, it could be fun and helpful to write down (digitally or otherwise) the words you hear in the song and see if the list grows with time. I've never tried that myself (the idea came from Caleb!), but it sounds like a fun thing to do. I could definitely use the listening practice myself, so I think I’ll try this sometime soon.

Eventually, though, you'll probably want to start looking stuff up to see what you're missing. Googling the song + artist name + 歌詞 (かし / kashi // lyrics) should lead you to the lyrics pretty fast. From there, you can listen and read at the same time, which should help with picking up more of the words.

Still, Japanese lyrics don't always use the most common words or kanji with those words. No worries if it’s tough to read. Could be good to just bring it into your preferred dictionary or simply move on and see if you can catch what they’re saying in a few months from now. (Many lyric sites don't allow copy and pasting for whatever reason. You can search until you find one that does or use some sort of optical recognition* to copy the test instead, and then bring it into your preferred dictionary.)

If you do look things up in a dictionary, though, I don't think I'd worry too much about trying to memorize it from there or making a flashcard out of it. You'll hear the word again and again every time you listen to the song, so it should stick with time.

*If you have a relatively recent phone, taking a screenshot and then holding your finger on the text in your photos app should pull the text for you. If you can't figure out how to to do it, try looking up "[device name] OCR" and it should come up. Google Translate can also do this.
No matter what program you end up using though, I'd recommend bringing the text into a dictionary so you can try to interpret it yourself, rather than relying on a machine translation. Or see how others translate the song by searching with 英訳 added onto the end! Or ask in the NativShark community's #japanese-help channel~

Personally, I've found that I love listening to music wrapped up in a blanket just before bed when I'm a certain kind of tired, with the lyrics open and just looking up words I'm curious about. So cozy. I try not to take it too seriously, and only ever worry about understanding just a tiny bit more each time.

It's a long journey after all. And I know I’ll get there eventually as long as I keep taking steps, no matter how big or small they are on a given day ^^

P.S. keep an eye out for a video dropping soon on the Japanese with Niko channel!

Telling temperature

Body temperature can be talked about a bit differently in Japanese. Notably, you might hear the "30" dropped:

Of course, this is in Celsius. It's good to get an idea of Celsius in Japan in case you grew up with Fahrenheit like I did ^^

This sentence comes from a lesson in Milestone 35 (Phase 3, Unit 155). You can reach it by pressing the Study Now button as consistently as possible, if you're not there already:

If you haven't started your learning journey yet, you'll need your account first! You can make one for free here:

NativShark goodie bag

NativShark Units

3 new Units have been added to Phase Three!

As always, these Units are filled with vocab in unique contexts, any relevant new kanji, and natural conversations called Dialogues at the end, all of which are designed to get you functional in Japanese as efficiently as possible.

These Units also feature the following lessons:

Thanks for reading all the way to the end ^^

Good luck out there and happy studies,
Ty & the NativShark Team