Lyricstraining

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WalkingAlone13
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Lyricstraining

Postby WalkingAlone13 » Tue Dec 08, 2015 2:39 pm

I often see this come up, but at the same time not. I'd imagine it's because I visit this forum and that's where I hear of it, but I would imagine that I probably would not have heard of it without being a member of this and the previous forum.

I decided that I would have a look at it today whilst procrastinating on an important essay that I have to hand in tomorrow. Okay, seriously I will finish it after I write this post. My thoughts though, are positive however the negative is quite a big negative. I imagine it's because I am new and have no idea what I am doing, but the actual number of videos available for each language isn't as large as I would have imagined, though saying this, for German it did have around 5-6 songs by artists that I enjoy. Not necessarily my favourite songs by those artists, but still, it was nice to see them there.

The negative, from my very short experience with the site, is that to increase the number of videos available for use, naturally you have to create them. I lack any technical skills so I was hoping this would be relatively easy and I could just find some videos from various video sharing sites, grab the lyrics from a lyric site and synchronise them. Perhaps this is possible and I just don't see it? I attempted to add my own lyrics, which is basically making your own video. I found a video that had good audio, for one of my favourite artists. I input the details, artist, song name, etc.
However, when I actually set about creating it (adding the lyrics) I realised this was definitely not going to be as easy I would have hoped. I typed it all of the lyrics line by line. I then played the video back synchronising the lines with the audio, this didn't go well...some of the lines ended up being out of synch but it didn't appear very easy to remedy, at least for me.
Still, I thought I'd preview to see just how it turned out, as if it's just me using it before it gets approved, I don't mind it being a little out of synch.
I basically followed the "help" tab as closely as possible and still ended up out of synch. The instructions were not all that great, either. I often had to re-read in order to be sure I was doing whatever it was I wanted to do, right.

So, I was wondering if anyone here has any tips or experience they could share on the best way to create these videos? I am hoping I just made things overly difficult for myself and in actual fact it's a breeze to create and use videos on the site as I'd really like to use it, just I'd not have the time to spend so long on creating a video with all the synching, etc. I can't even use the video I created as when I attempt to preview it, it just says the page is not available despite it clearly being "finished".

Yes, this is a strange post. I was attempting to review it from the perspective of a member of five minutes (though the video took me 40 minutes plus) but also try to discover elements of the site a new user wouldn't know. Mostly as the site has almost no information, which strikes me as incredibly strange. And ask for help at the same time :) *looks at Serpent*
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Re: Lyricstraining

Postby Serpent » Wed Dec 09, 2015 7:45 am

First, a quick description link for those new to lyricstraining :D

I'm glad you tried it out! Honestly, for me the best part is discovering new music, for example via the genre filter. As a metalhead I'd never really expect to find my fave songs there, it's simply been such a joy to find a resource for learning via music that isn't pop :P

I did add a few songs back in 2012 though. They still show up only in pending revision :| Honestly I did that more for the benefit of others than for myself. You're expected to know a song quite well if you add it (not necessarily with meaning attached to the syllables). As far as I remember, Ataegina took me about an hour, but if you listen you'll know why :lol: But like any work with subtitles, parallel texts etc, this gets faster when you get used to it.

Note that back then the exact word wasn't highlighted, so admittedly I bothered much less with the timing. I now fixed two of the songs, to the best of my ability :D This was also my first experience with the new interface for creating lyrics. First of all, on the right there's an import/export button, which should presumably allow you to import an entire text before marking each line. Then, I know the songs so well that it was fairly easy to pause right before the next line starts and click the empty box on the left to begin the line. It seems like it's best to begin too early rather than too late. I also had to add several more empty lines where I didn't bother previously. And depending on the song, the individual lines may be too long so you have to split them. BTW anything you don't want to test should go into brackets, like the words that are present in the lyrics but skipped while singing, or lines in a different language like English or in my case Latin.

Not sure about preview, I just saved my changes (after a few false starts where I messed up and refreshed the page to avoid saving them) and played from my lyrics page. I think it's totally fine to save works in progress rather than use the preview button.

Feel free to link to your song here or by PM btw :)
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WalkingAlone13
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Re: Lyricstraining

Postby WalkingAlone13 » Wed Dec 09, 2015 2:02 pm

Thanks for your reply, Serpent! :)

It's funny you should mention discovering new music as that happened as soon as I joined, there was a category for popular songs at present and one was a Christmas song. I am a bit of a Christmas freak so had to check it out and I ended up really liking it, so I now have another favourite Christmas song to annoy everyone with by singing it repetitively whenever the occasion presents itself, which is obviously anytime, right? :)
The song is "Wise guys - Last Christmas" (This song is in German, despite the first line being in English)

I did wonder about the pending review, that was what I did wrong, by the way. I did not set it as pending review, so although the video was "finished" it was still not available for preview. However, once you change it to pending review you can then test it and preview and such. I started off with a slow song so as to make it easier for me, being new and all, but actually even that wasn't all that easy. Though, saying this, it isn't as bad as I initially thought. I went back to my video today and tweaked it a bit and it didn't take that long. I can imagine that as you say, once you have made a few the speed in which one will be able to create videos will dramatically increase.
I was a little weary of fixing some of the synch problems, nothing that will effect the learning, just if there's music after a line, it will go over that line slowly counting the music. I don't think I explained that well, but if you try it you'll see what I mean.

Thanks for pointing out the import/export functions, I have now located them and will hopefully be able to make use of them for my next video. I doubt I'll make another for a little while yet, I still want to work on some of the songs I have saved as a favourite at the moment.
It's also very useful to know about the functions of brackets, so thanks again for that tip, I think I will have to use that for one of the videos I have planned for later.

Also, do you happen to have any Finnish songs on there? I couldn't find a category for Finnish, unfortunately. I was hoping I could relive some memories through Happoradio or Uniklubi. It looks like I'll have to make some for both bands later on, once I've caught up a little on the lost ground I have accrued with German.

If you'd like to check out my video, bearing in mind it is by no means synched perfectly, you are more than welcome. :)
http://lyricstraining.com/play/silbermo ... lkingAlone

Thanks again for the information! :)


*Edit I have found a few more songs I like now that I know to search for pending review as well, unfortunately I have also noticed somebody had already made a video for the same song I did, that is also pending review so that's why I didn't see it. Ah well, at least I still have the song if neither get approved :) Though some of these approvals are like 3 years old plus, which is a little odd in itself as I would imagine a lot of people would give up trying.
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Re: Lyricstraining

Postby Serpent » Wed Dec 09, 2015 3:12 pm

WalkingAlone13 wrote:I was a little weary of fixing some of the synch problems, nothing that will effect the learning, just if there's music after a line, it will go over that line slowly counting the music. I don't think I explained that well, but if you try it you'll see what I mean.
Yep, that's why I had to add empty lines as well. It was no big deal when the whole line was highlighted, in fact it was beneficial as it remained in the spotlight longer. But now that it's highlighted gradually, more empty lines are needed. It should start as soon as the previous line ends.

BTW when playing from the comp, there are hotkeys: backspace to repeat the line, tab to skip the word, dash to show one letter. obviously you lose some points with all of these. And this is why reasonably good syncing is important, though it doesn't have to be perfect.

I also see that they've added "exercises" and multiple choice mode. I'm yet to try these out.

Oh and you noted that there's not much info, and the site is not well-known. That's true, although I'm kinda wondering if they're deliberately staying low profile to avoid copyright claims. They do say it's for personal educational use only, and of course it's youtube hosting the videos, but who knows... it also seems like it was started as a site for learning English, possibly for Spanish speakers. And people providing almost any kind of service tend to forget that what is obvious to them won't be so obvious to other people. (I have no clue how the points are calculated nowadays, for example... I kinda don't care)

As for pending review, I think they mostly bother approving the songs that become popular even while pending. The good thing is that they don't seem to remove any "normal" content. Like, they'd probably remove a spam video (especially if it was reported), but not a poorly synced one... one of my videos was gone from youtube, but I simply replaced it and adjusted the timing. The video had been marked as deleted, but it still showed up in my lyrics, and I was able to fix it and mark as pending review again.

I've never added any Finnish songs. I guess it's best to mark them as German because the diacritics are the same.
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Re: Lyricstraining

Postby Flarioca » Mon Dec 28, 2015 2:51 am

I've just seen the "music from Brazil" in Lyricstraining and I cannot believe how much awful music they have chosen. Almost offensive. Indeed, I was already upset with how little enjoyable music one can find in other languages, but the brazilian "selection" is a crime against good taste and world culture.

That said, I'll continue to use it for a while, but if there isn't a way to improve musical quality, nothing can keep people listening to that amount of garbage.

Sorry about this rant, anyway.
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Re: Lyricstraining

Postby Serpent » Mon Dec 28, 2015 10:54 am

Have you noticed the genre list and the pending revision box? :)
I was disappointed by how few European Portuguese songs they have, but I liked some (most?) of the Brazilian ones I tried.
Also, I think most of us are more harsh when judging L1 music than L2 :D
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Re: Lyricstraining

Postby iguanamon » Mon Dec 28, 2015 12:26 pm

We all have our own particular tastes in music. There is no way on Earth that a site like lyricstraining can be all things to all people. It's not about being a catchall for exploring the wide variety of musical genres for a country or a language. It's about introducing people to listening and working with non-learner intended native materials outside of a course.

Most courses and websites for people learning a language have aspects that people aren't going to like. The thing is, does it always make sense to throw the baby out with the bath water? To me, no, it doesn't. The thing with a song is that it 's short. While I am not a metal/euro-pop/alternative/rap music fan, if lyricstraining had songs up in these genres with lyrics I could work with for Ladino and Haitian Creole, I would have tolerated them and used them as part of my "by any means necessary" philosophy for minority languages. Ten or fifteen minutes of my time listening to rap or heavy metal in a language, even if I don't like it, is not going to kill me.

I think learners of big languages are spoiled for choice and they often let tolerance for choice get in the way of using what is available to help learn a language. That's something valuable that learning a minority language has taught me.

That being said, lyrics to songs are all over the web. I spent a lot of time with Tom Jobim when I was learning Portuguese:


There are at least some videos on youtube for most big languages with lyrics scrolling on screen. The thing about a site like lyricstraining, while it isn't perfect- it is at least "out of the box" ready to go. Some people like and need that. It does take a little bit of time and trouble to make one's own cloze deletion versions of song lyrics, but it can be done even for a language like Ladino:


Would I download this song and play it at a party or put it in rotation on my playlist? No, but for language-learning, especially for a minority language- this is gold.
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Re: Lyricstraining

Postby Flarioca » Mon Dec 28, 2015 2:51 pm

Serpent wrote:Have you noticed the genre list and the pending revision box? :)
I was disappointed by how few European Portuguese songs they have, but I liked some (most?) of the Brazilian ones I tried.
Also, I think most of us are more harsh when judging L1 music than L2 :D

Yes, I've browsed all genres in the Portuguese section, most have no music at all and those who have ... as I said ... :cry: Where's the pending revision box??

iguanamon wrote:We all have our own particular tastes in music. There is no way on Earth that a site like lyricstraining can be all things to all people. It's not about being a catchall for exploring the wide variety of musical genres for a country or a language. It's about introducing people to listening and working with non-learner intended native materials outside of a course.

My problem is that there are so many good and some wonderful well known brazilian music that it's amazing how carefully they have chosen the worst ones. For instance, in French and Italian there are some great songs in this site. A few, but they are there. In Portuguese, to be fair, there's "Garota de Ipanema" and some other ok music, but most of it is garbage.

Besides, each language catches my attention because of a different feature. For instance, I'm not a fan of Japanese music. It means that I won't study this language listening to music. On the other hand, that's exactly what I want to do while learning Georgian (if I manage to have time and stamina to do that at all).

Anyway, I must agree with Serpent that we are less tolerant when talking about our own stuff. ;)
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Re: Lyricstraining

Postby Serpent » Mon Dec 28, 2015 3:05 pm

Pending revision is an option you can tick when you have any search open, whether by name or genre.
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Re: Lyricstraining

Postby Serpent » Sat Apr 22, 2017 11:15 pm

I haven't tested them, but Finnish and Polish have been added!!!!!! :D :D :D :D :D :D :D
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