Using songs to help improve comprehension

[WalkingAlone13]

I listen to quite a lot of music, however, some songs, depending on the theme of the song, can be too difficult for me to fully grasp the song in its entirety. I have often thought about trying to incorporate songs more actively in my learning process, but I am not entirely sure how to do this.
I don't want it to become "study" as such, just something I can do for a little bit now and then to aid my comprehension - then, seeing as I listen to music every day, this could boost my comprehension by quite a lot. So far, the most obvious method of incorporating this seems to be to simply collect lyrics from the songs/bands/artists I listen to, and then enter them in on Memrise - but just do something tiny like 5 words a day. (I wouldn't call this study if it's just a small number of words now and then)
My concern for that would be that I wouldn't know whether to enter a full line of text of one entry, or enter the words individually. However, entering them individually might not be so easy as a lot of songs use colloquial speech or complete phrases that I might not know or be able to find a reliable translation for.

The second option that comes to mind would be to use a particular song as L-R material, but this might mean I become bored of the song before I know it well enough to understand it fully when I'm out and about, just chilling with my music. If I did try this, would I listen to the song in its entirety each time or would it be best to stop the song after a line of lyrics, verse, etc.?
I did this with the song "Was wirklich bleibt" listening to the song fully each time, checking the few lyrics I did not understand, and then listening to it several times paying close attention when the words I looked up came up. This song is easy, though, and I don't think it would work that well with different songs but I don't really know.

Any other possible options to try?

If you use songs to actively aid in your language learning, any tips or methods of incorporating it in a means that isn't too time consuming and does not take away any enjoyment from listening to those songs for pleasure, would be greatly appreciated.

*I know of Lyricstraining. It proved to ultimately be far too time consuming for me.

[AlexTG]

Lyrics Translate is a good resource for trying to understand the lyrics. Translations of lyrics are provided by the users themselves.

I don't really see the point of listening to a song on repeat (except for people who like doing that in the first place). Listening to it once a day for a week should be as beneficial as seven times in a row surely?

When it comes to memorising lyrics, I find I have to actually do it away from any particular recording. Just me, the lyrics, and the already memorised melody. It's great to have some foreign language songs waiting there in your head that you can belt out any time you want!

Musixmatch is a mobile app that can play the lyrics in time with your songs, like karaoke. They also have a brilliant chrome browser plugin which makes the lyrics appear on youtube music videos. Try getting bored of that! [tech note: if you have any other youtube plugins you'll have to turn them off, it doesn't play nice with them]

For Japanese learners Musixmatch is no good because most of the lyrics are in romaji . But I've been making a playlist of videos that have kanji lyrics inbuilt.

[reineke]

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[Hank]

I incorporate music in my learning routine, but not in a serious way. When I get hooked on a Banda song, I find the lyrics on the internet and translate them as best I can. Banda lyrics tend to be very slang heavy. Then whenever I hear the song I have an idea of what the lyrics are. I just listen for enjoyment, and don't actively study when I'm listening. I think it helps my vocabulary and listening comprehension somewhat, but mostly I just like the music.

I think the issue is that's it's often difficult to understand sung lyrics in English, and I would think that would be true of sung lyrics in any language.

[Elenia]

I like learning song lyrics, and I've talked about it a couple times. I love music, but I'm not a huge music lover, so I tend to only listen to a few artists at a time, and of those artists, only a few songs. I like learning to sing along to songs and looking up lyrics in English, so I'm a lucky one - everything I do anyway works really well for language acquisition! I often sing to myself as well, which is great practice for at least getting a few words out there and recalling the words locked up in my head.

The songs I've learnt well in Swedish, I have written down the lyrics while listening to them, and then corrected and (sort of) translated the words I don't know. Most of the time, I've heard the song enough that learning to sing it afterwards is a piece of cake. I've also learnt pretty much all of my Norwegian from songs, but that is definitely a special case - a complication of the Kaizer virus I've learnt some of my most interesting vocabulary from song lyrics.

How to learn to sing the lyrics of your favourite songs will be different for you than it is for me. I don't really think that my dictation-like approach is really necessary, but I enjoy doing it. Translating the lyrics, or finding and reading a translation, always helps as I can remember the words better when I know what they mean. I wouldn't really recommend putting lyrics into memrise or seriously studying them in any systematic way unless you'll actually and actively enjoy doing that. I have put a few interesting song phrases into anki, but only as cards where I've highlighted the interesting bit, not as cards where I'm forced to interact in any way.

I've found the best songs to learn and to learn from are ones that tell a story. They tend to have the most interesting and useful vocabulary, and seem to me to be easier to remember. Maybe in lieu of L-Ring or memrising one song, find an album or albums by one group of artists. Like with TV series, you'll find that you get used to the way they sing, the way they pronounce things, and you'll be able to start unlocking the lyrics yourself. A good way to test this is to look up lyrics to only a few of their songs, and then see what you can pick out in others. Don't strain yourself - the goal is not to make the songs something you dread having to hear. If you want to give up and look at the lyrics, do it. Read through them, and the next time you listen to the song you'll notice more. If you don't want to look up the lyrics at all, that's also fine. Just make sure whatever your doing is enjoyable, and stop the minute it no longer interests you.

Sorry, this post is kind of jumbled because I couldn't really order my thoughts properly, but I hope it is helpful in some way!