Learn French through music

French musicListening to music can be a fun and interesting way not only to experience some culture, but also to improve your French. Researchers at Edinburgh University[1] found that participants who learned foreign language phrases and sang them back performed better than those who just spoke them. The singers also remembered the phrases more accurately in the long term.

So whether you like rock, rap, or country music, there are bound to be French-speaking artists creating songs you’ll enjoy singing along to in order to improve your French!

How to learn French with music

There are various ways you can use music to work on your French.

Pronunciation: sing along, making a special effort to mimic the singer’s pronunciation as closely as possible.

Listening comprehension: listen as many times as you need to in order to make sense of the lyrics.

Grammar and vocabulary: write down the lyrics and highlight any tricky vocabulary and grammar so that you can look it up.

LyricsTraining is an ingenious way to gamify your French by listening to music. Start by choosing a game mode (beginner, intermediate, advanced, expert) and then listen to the song while typing the missing lyrics. You can just challenge yourself or create a free account to play against others.

Music videos

With a bit of googling, you can find thousands upon thousands of French music videos for just about any genre you can think of. Here are a few links to help you get started.

Bilingual articles

French resources

Reference

1 Ludke KM, Ferreira F, Overy K. (2014). “Singing can facilitate foreign language learning,” Memory & Cognition, Jan 2014, p. 41-52

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Author info

Laura K Lawless

Laura is a French expert and Kwiziq's Head of Quality Control. Online educator since '99, Laura is passionate about language, travel, and cooking. She's American by birth and a permanent ex-pat by choice - freelancing made it possible for her to travel extensively and live in several countries before settling permanently in Guadeloupe. Laura is the author of Lawless French, Lawless Spanish, and other websites and books on French, Spanish, Italian, English, and vegetarianism. She spends most of her spare time reading, playing with food, and enjoying water sports.

Comments: 4

There's an app called MusicMatch that will give you lyrics for many French songs, and sometimes translations, as well.

Your first link http://www.onlylyrics.com/top-songs-french.php took me to a scam/spam page pretending to be Google issuing free iPhone!!!!

There is a minor grammatical mistake in the fourth line: songs you’ll enjoying singing along

Merci beaucoup Soroush !

This typo has now been fixed :)

Bonne journée !