Hello, everyone, welcome to Chinese Songs Season 1: Learn Chinese through beautiful Chinese folk songs. As you all know, learning songs is a great means of learning language ever since our birth. The melodious rhythm, poetic and rhymed language, frequent use of refrains and repetition in songs are not only intoxicating to our mind and heart, but also make the lyrics highly memorable and make the learning experience close to our childhood learning experience of our mother tongues. This sequence of learning Mandarin Chinese through Chinese songs includes popular Chinese songs from different Ages, genres and geographical regions and therefore embody the cultural diversity and folk customs of the different races constituting Chinese culture. The first season of this sequence chose mostly popular folk songs, because folk songs have strong local-color music and tune, simple but beautiful language, and embody most the idiosyncrasies of each geographical region and racial or minority culture. Passing down from generation to generation, they have constituted the unforgettable fabric of the rich Chinese culture. All the ten songs chosen for this course are extremely popular Chinese folk songs passed down through generations and well-known to every household. Being able to sing them will allow you to be considered as an insider of Chinese culture when you go to China or communicate with Chinese people and therefore endear you to them. Among these 10 songs, "Jasmine flower" is from Jiang Su Province, the southern China, and embodies the feminine, soft beauty and oblique expression of love in the cultural ambience of southern China, "Kang Ding Love Song" is from Si Chuan province, with its bolder, opener expression of love, "Ali Shan's Girls" are from Taiwan, with its local mountain and water and native Taiwanese customs. 

Each song is taught in two lectures, the first lecture will introduce you to the language of the lyrics, you will learn vocabularies and lyrics: I will explain to you the meaning of the lyrics, and lead you to read it twice, and ask you questions about them. Then I will sing to you  the song, and lead you to sing twice after me sentence by sentence, before you will sing together with me. All these repetition will ensure you to sing the songs accurately and beautifully and understand the lyrics thoroughly. The second lecture is the singing video of a professionally trained singer, so you can sing together with her, with your by-then-already-memorized lyrics in your head. 

You will see you can master a great range of Chinese language through these songs, from expression of emotion to description of Nature, appreciate the diverse beauty of the poetic and musical ambience of Chinese culture in different geographical regions, and these lyrics will be branded in your memory and delighted heart as almost your first language did. 

Please do check out the last lecture with free youtube links of these songs sung by the most famous Chinese singers, and other related course information.