Shadowing Practice: Chinese Music - It's Not Dead, It's Misunderstood... - Learn English Speaking with Video

Even if you live in the West, you've probably heard of this song.

Or this song.

But unless you live in these countries in East Asia, or understand the language, you've probably never heard of this.

That's because what you're listening to is CPOP.

And it's dead.

There's even a whole video essay about it.

In it, it argues that the TikTokification and attempts to copy the K-pop industry has caused detriment to the CPOP scene.

That sayings like CPOP is doomed or CPOP has flopped have been spreading all over Chinese Twitter.

I'll link the video down below.

It's a great video.

So it seems to be common consensus now that CPOP is dead.

Or is it?

Because to answer, is CPOP dead?

You first have to answer, what is CPOP?

Seems straightforward because the clue's in the name, but the problem with separating genres with language is we end up taking into the genre everything else that doesn't fit.

For instance, you'd rarely see people consider this to be K-pop.

Or this.

is.

If we take a look at CPOP, we get the exact same problem.

Not everything in Chinese is considered CPOP.

To make matters more confusing, Chinese pop is split into every dialect that uses Chinese.

So when we sing there's Cantonese pop, Mandarin pop, Hokkien pop, the list goes on.

All that's fine because it still doesn't change the fact that it needs to be in a Chinese dialect to be CPOP.

But if we want to define the genre, there has to be a better way.

Instead of just looking at the music, it's worth considering everything else that surrounds it.

Take K-pop for example.

You generally have an easier time defining it if you factor in its idol culture.

In fact, I'd say it's the key difference between K-pop and other Korean music.

That's why one song can get remade twice.

And while one is considered K-pop, the other one isn't.

It's also interesting to note that these two songs were released within days of each other.

Even if we look at J-pop, we get more or less the same analogy.

There's a plethora of talented musicians out there making great songs in Japan, but if you were to name a J-pop song off the top of your head right now, there's a good to fair chance that it's an anime theme song.

Okay, cool, now we're getting somewhere.

Let's try to define CPOP by its global driving force.

K-pop has their idols, J-pop has their anime, and we have...

I don't...

I don't know what we have.

And that's the first problem.

CPOP has great music, but what we lack is a musical vessel like everyone else to influence the world.

And you know what sucks?

We used to have the biggest one.

Fei Wang, she's the best.

I don't know anybody who hasn't seen this movie that hasn't gotten a crush on her.

That's right, 80s and 90s Hong Kong cinema.

The films that made everyone think all Chinese people know kung fu, drive stunt cars and smoke cigarettes and sunglasses.

On top of that, they also drummed their theme songs into every head that fell in love with the movies.

Those were

the days.

Those were the days.

Well, shit.

One financial crisis, a handover ceremony and a SARS pandemic later, the Hong Kong film industry disappeared from the global spotlight in under a decade, along with its iconic theme songs.

But that can't be it.

That's just Hong Kong.

CPOP is made in China, Taiwan, Malaysia, Singapore, and everywhere that uses its dialects.

It must be something else.

Let's listen to more theme songs.

How在我们从不必说明什么...

Not as a pattern?

No?

Let's keep going.

Still nothing?

Let me give you a hint.

They are all ballads.

Now, I know what you must be saying.

Ballads are a very common choice for movie theme songs, even in the West.

And you're right.

But over here, this shit spreads way beyond the movie theaters.

If we flashback to this video where it all started, this screenshot of the top 10 charts on QQ Music where the commentator used to point out how old the songs are.

Something really strange lies here.

7 out of these 10 songs were released 10 years ago.

Oh yeah, that's strange.

You know what's more strange?

You know what's even more fucked up in this screenshot?

9 out of these 10 songs are ballads.

Make no mistake, you are looking at one of the most ballad-heavy music ecosystems in the world.

Now, to the outsider, it might sound weird that our charts are topped by depressing breakup songs.

But for some reason we love it.

We love singing them in karaoke's and birthday parties Even in weddings, which is kind of fucked up,

but whatever But the popularity of ballads in CPOP is not without its reasons The main one is because Chinese dialects are spoken with tones,

a mechanic that's neither present in Korean, Japanese,

nor English Some Chinese dialects like Cantonese have up to nine tones So our language family already has musicality built into it In tonal languages words must be intonated the right way in relation with other words to preserve its meaning

And so songwriters and composers in CPOP have to work extra hard to create melodies and lyrics that marry each other flawlessly.

For instance, here's a line of a very popular Cantonese pop song without its melody.

So if I have to find a tune that fits this line, what can I do?

Well, let's start with the easy part.

The first two words are identical.

This is because in Chinese dialects, it's very common to double up a word to strengthen its meaning.

For example, 天 means day, and 天天 means everyday.

听 means listen, and 听听 means listen carefully.

So you would think if 痛 means pain, then 痛痛 means it really hurts.

But instead it's used like this.

I fucking love this language.

Anyway, as you can imagine, in Canto Pop, it's very common for double words to have either identical or similar notes in music to avoid confusion.

So in our case, we can just do this.

The second part, 頭上, actually starts with identical tone as the two words before.

But because in context, this is a separate phrase, we can get away by not mapping it to the same notes.

That being said, it still requires a rising tone to preserve its meaning.

Like this.

100

The last part is actually a little tricky, because the words fei, fa are actually in the highest tone bracket in Cantonese.

101

Meaning, once you've set the word fei, you can't follow it up with any other word that goes higher.

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It won't mean anything.

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So in music, having an ascending interval for these two words might cause confusion.

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But there's a catch.

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For one, unlike the first example, these aren't identical words.

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So a slight deviation won't hurt.

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Also, context matters.

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This is actually a very common phrase in poetry, so it's less likely to be misheard.

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And lastly, there's nothing to be misheard for.

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The word fa is actually one of the only two terms that exist for this particular syllable, meaning you can only say the word fa in two ways.

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The only other way that makes sense, fa, doesn't make any sense when combined with the first word.

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Because of that, you can actually take quite a bit of musical liberty for these two words, like this.

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And now with all these considerations put together, we finally turn this line into music.

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And this laborious process that's unique to CPOP

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results in some of the most sophisticated music there is in

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the world Even world-class singers have trouble keeping up I'm so sorry to hear the melody.

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I'm so sorry to hear the melody.

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It's not a melody, but it's not a melody.

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It's so beautiful to move on and move on.

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If I take this last part of the line and just say it as is, you can almost hear the melody of the final song.

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So, If

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this sounds like a songwriter's nightmare to you, keep in mind that this level of tone melody correspondence is far more stringent in Cantonese than in Mandarin.

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This is a 2023 study done by a professor for spoken language processing in the University of Munich.

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In their test, they selected nine pairs of C-pop songs which have both Mandarin and Cantonese versions and compared the lyrics to see how well the natural tones of both dialects map onto the same melody.

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The result?

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Cantonese versions were consistently more tone sensitive than the Mandarin counterparts, with 77% of the lyrics matching the melody, while the Mandarin versions only matched 38%.

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That being said, the songs used for these tests are all over 10 years old, some are even pushing 20 years old.

128

Since then we've become much more accustomed to songwriters taking liberty by going off tone.

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But the one big takeaway remains undisputed.

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Chinese dialects are perfect for ballads.

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All this sounds great, but what if a gift from the tones that the ballad gods have given us is now actively fighting against the songwriters in just about every other genre?

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Just think about how hard it is to write a Cantonese EDM for example.

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The point of EDM is that the melody is supposed to be simple and catchy, like this.

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But if this chorus was in Cantonese, you'd have to find five words in either identical or at least similar tones to put them there.

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They have to make sense, they have to rhyme a second time, and they have to be about pasta, which isn't that nuance of an idea in the first place.

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But even the word pasta are in two different tones, so you're fucked from the get-go.

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That being said, it doesn't mean we don't have catchy dance music, it just means we have to work around it.

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For example, what if you have to write a song for a canto pop idol?

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Well one thing you can do is to start the song in Cantonese, and then switch to English for the chorus.

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Another way to do it is to not have lyrics for the chorus at all.

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Hip-hop is another great example.

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In English, for instance, hip-hop artists are known to use tones to create rhythm and emphases on certain words in the lyrics.

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Like this.

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Girl, I can buy a Westy girl with my bass dub.

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Ooh, that pussy good, won't you sit it on my taste buds.

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What you're listening to specifically is something called the phrase final declination.

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It refers to a phenomenon in speech where the pitch of a voice drops significantly as it reaches the end of a sentence.

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If English is your first language, you probably do this a lot without even thinking about it.

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Unsurprisingly, this technique has become a large part of rap music.

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His palms are sweaty, knees weak, arms are heavy, There's vomit on his sweater already.

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Mom's spaghetti, he's nervous.

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But when hip-hop got introduced into Chinese music, things got complicated.

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Let's look at Mandarin.

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As mentioned before, for a sentence to achieve phrase final declination, you have to pitch down at the end of a line.

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But in all four tones of Mandarin, only the fourth and the occasional neutral tone can achieve a low intonation at the end of a syllable.

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Ma, ma, ma, ma, ma.

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Not only that, the fourth tone's pitch doesn't stay constant.

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It's what we refer to as a contour tone, where the voice has to pitch up and down within a single syllable.

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Ma.

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And because unlike Cantonese, where there are multiple tones that stay relatively low and flat, Mandarin hip-hop relies heavily on its fourth tone to achieve phrase final declination.

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But I'm in the group of people I'm in the middle of the world I'm in the middle of the world As you can imagine, not having the whole vocabulary available becomes limiting for the songwriters So if you want to write a Mandarin hip-hop song, what can you do?

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Well, like in Canto Pop, one thing you can do is to just substitute the line ending syllables with English

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Granted that a good portion of the reason is to cater to an international audience, according to a 2023 study published by the Journal of New Music Research,

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out of a sample size of 34 modern Mandarin trap style rap music, English words account for 32% of all line ending syllables.

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It's an elegant solution.

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But what if you don't want English lyrics, you don't want to work with tonal constraints, and yet you still want to make catchy Chinese music?

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Well, your only other option is to be this guy.

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I think it's just a mistake.

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Don't try to understand it.

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Feel it.

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You

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know what,

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at this point I'm convinced that even he doesn't know what the fuck he's singing about.

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Now, you may be asking, if J-Chi was able to sing past all of the tonal obstacles by simply mumbling and slurring through lyrics, why can't everybody do it?

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And the answer is simple.

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So, if we take a step back, we start to see the full picture.

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Why is it hard to make Chinese music?

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Well because Chinese is music.

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And considering where the trend is taking us, the linguistic structure of Chinese dialects makes it hard for songwriters and composers to produce music that's simple and catchy, an important ingredient for worldwide success on the international stage.

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And that's understandable.

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Pop songs, by definition, are popular songs.

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And it's hard to imagine an international audience going to a music festival like Coachella, expecting to have a good time, and then play them a sad ballad.

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But does that mean it's dead?

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Not really.

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Because international success doesn't matter.

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popularity has never been an indication of quality.

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The fact that CPOP is failing to copy K-pop is a good thing, because we already have K-pop.

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But it also doesn't mean CPOP can't evolve.

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Indie rock, hip-hop and R&B artists are pushing the boundaries every single day.

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It's just going to take more trial and error to traverse our beautifully complex language.

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Maybe CPOP will one day get the spotlight on the international stage, be it in its current form or an amalgamation of what's coming next.

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But if it doesn't, so what?

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It just means it's not for everyone.

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It's for us.

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I've always wanted to do some with the Japanese movie or Japanese music and the Japanese movie.

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It's a shame that this channel is always working on the English.

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I've never found a chance.

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I hope you can support this video and support more Japanese viewers.

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If you like this video, please like and subscribe We'll see you next time

Wat is de Shadowing-techniek?

Shadowing is een wetenschappelijk onderbouwde taalleermethode die oorspronkelijk is ontwikkeld voor professionele tolkentraining en gepopulariseerd door polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. De methode is eenvoudig maar krachtig: je luistert naar native Engelse audio en herhaalt het onmiddellijk hardop — als een schaduw die de spreker volgt met slechts 1–2 seconden vertraging. In tegenstelling tot passief luisteren of grammaticadrills, dwingt shadowing je hersenen en mondspieren om echte spraakpatronen tegelijkertijd te verwerken en te reproduceren. Onderzoek toont aan dat het de uitspraaknauwkeurigheid, intonatie, ritme, verbonden spraak, luisterbegrip en spreekvaardigheid aanzienlijk verbetert — waardoor het een van de meest effectieve methoden is voor IELTS Speaking-voorbereiding en echte Engelse communicatie.

Shadowing Practice: Chinese Music - It's Not Dead, It's Misunderstood... - Learn English Speaking with Video

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