BeChineseHow do you learn Chinese from songs?
Pick a song you like and already know by ear. Read its lyrics a line at a time, look up the words you can’t read, and keep the ones you want to learn, then listen again and follow along. Songs repeat their words, so a few verses go a long way, and a tune makes them easier to remember.
BeChinese makes the looking up quick. It reads the lyrics wherever your music app shows them, so you never copy and paste: brush across a line, and its pinyin appears over the words, they’re read aloud, and a card shows what each means.
In any music app
Open a song’s lyrics in Spotify, Apple Music, QQ音乐, 网易云音乐, KKBOX or YouTube Music, and press the Action Button (or tap Show Pinyin in Control Center). That screen opens in BeChinese’s Lens, frozen as it was. Scroll on to the next verse and press again.
Setting up the Action Button or Control Center takes a minute, once: see pinyin over any app.
From YouTube
Share a song’s video from YouTube to BeChinese, and it becomes a lesson: the video at the top, the lyrics under it line by line, lit as they’re sung. Tap a word, and the video pauses with its pinyin over it and a card with its meaning; where the lesson has the timing, you hear the word in the singer’s own voice. Lyric videos with YouTube’s Chinese subtitles work best. Lyrics shown in the picture are read off it, and a song with neither is listened to, which is rougher with singing than with speech. The lyrics are kept for your account only. Some official music videos can’t be fetched.
Music videos with Chinese subtitles shared from TikTok or Instagram become lessons the same way. See learning Chinese from YouTube for how sharing works.
The words you save
Every word you save comes back as a flashcard, shown in the lyrics where you met it and scheduled by FSRS, a spaced-repetition algorithm, so you review it until it’s familiar. Simplified and traditional characters both work.
What you need
An iPhone on iOS 26 or later. You sign in with Apple or Google, then choose a plan, yearly, monthly or weekly, through the App Store. The yearly plan can start with a free week.
