How a Karaoke Song Became a Language Learning Tool
Studying to sing
Growing up, my parents sent us to Chinese school every Sunday. Around our part of New York, that wasn't unusual — plenty of kids spent their weekends doing the same. Some thrived. Others didn't. I was in the latter more or less.
Somewhere between high school and a summer or two spent in Taiwan however, something shifted. I started picking up Chinese music — mostly a collection of CDs from Taiwan. I couldn't understand what the songs were really about but some had catchy tunes and I could pick up a few words here and there. It wasn't until college that I finally learned to actually sing my first Chinese song:
I can't remember exactly why I wanted to learn that one. What I do remember is sitting in my dorm — which was, quite literally, the smallest double on campus — playing the song on repeat and writing down the sound of every character I could distinguish. I'd match each sound against the Chinese lyrics printed in the CD sleeve.
I couldn't understand what the song was about. I couldn't read the lyrics. But I could map the sounds to their characters, one at a time.
That became my practice form.
The Method That Stuck
From there, it was just repetition. Play the CD. Sing along. Rinse. Repeat. It wasn't fast, but eventually I got 90% of the way there. The rest filled in over time.
For a long stretch — years, really — that was the only Chinese song I could pull off at karaoke. It wasn't until almost a decade later, when I moved to China, that I started expanding my repertoire. (That's a story for another time.)
But the method never changed:
- Repetition over translation.
- Sounds first, meanings later.
- Bias toward songs I actually wanted to sing.
The goal was never really to learn Chinese. It was to have fun and sing along. The learning was a side effect.
Enter Singy
Singy started as an experiment — a bit of vibe coding with Claude Code to see how hard it would be to spin up a tool that turned Chinese music videos into flash cards. The idea: an easier way to keep adding songs to my repertoire, and pick up vocabulary along the way.