A Twitter exchange this morning has prompted me to do a blog about the best sites to find French music with lyrics. As well as simple videos, there are also sites with gaps to fill and with translations. Here is what I've come up with. They are ordered with the best first (in my opinion) in terms of how useful they are to a French teacher.
Do let me know if I have missed something really good!
Carmen Vera Perez's excellent interactive site has a large range of songs in the La Chanson francophone en cours de FLE section, with Hot Potato exercises. You choose your level, choose your song, then do the Hotpot exercise - gap fill with drop down choices, multi-choice etc. Some songs come with just a listening track, others with a link to an external site such as Daily Motion.
Lyricstraining is a super site. You register, choose your song and then complete gap fills which appear beneath the videos. You can choose three levels, though this just varies the number if gaps to fill. It's a good interface and students could just work away online. My search for Cabrel songs came up with three, Florent Pagny 0, Mylène Farmer 3 and Edith Piaf 2. So you could say that the choice of songs is not huge, but the principle is excellent. There is a separate ipad edition.
Bonjour de France has gap fill songs to complete, in the same style as LyricsTraining. Songs paus eto give you time to cmplete the blanks. there are three levels of difficulty based on how many words are blanked out.
Lyricstranslate has a huge archive of translated songs in many languages, including songs. A quick search for Francis Cabrel revealed a good number of his songs translated rather well into English. This is a crowd sourcing site so the quality of the translations would need to be carefully checked.
Lyricsgaps has a very useful worksheet tool. You register (free) and then can create quick gapfill worksheets, choosing with a tick box system which words you wish to blank out. The resulting worksheet is quite attractive and can be shared through social media.
Great French Songs is a blog with lyrics translated into English. This could be useful to a teacher who wished to set a retranslation exercise to a class. You hand out the English version, play the song with pauses and get the class to translate back into French. This is a good multi-skill activity. By the way, on the site there is also a grammatical or lexical focus where snippets of the song lyrics are picked out to demonstrate, say, a verb or adverb.
www.chansons-fr.com is the site I blogged about very recently, with its large collections of videos, with songs sorted by theme, linguistic focus and difficulty level. This is the work of a French FLE teacher in Japan. There are a good number of old songs in this collection, but just the lyrics and music, no exercises.
www.redkaraoke.com looks a fun site, but you pay to access the full range of songs, including French ones. subscription starts about 4 USD a week.
Do let me know if I have missed something really good!
Carmen Vera Perez's excellent interactive site has a large range of songs in the La Chanson francophone en cours de FLE section, with Hot Potato exercises. You choose your level, choose your song, then do the Hotpot exercise - gap fill with drop down choices, multi-choice etc. Some songs come with just a listening track, others with a link to an external site such as Daily Motion.
Lyricstraining is a super site. You register, choose your song and then complete gap fills which appear beneath the videos. You can choose three levels, though this just varies the number if gaps to fill. It's a good interface and students could just work away online. My search for Cabrel songs came up with three, Florent Pagny 0, Mylène Farmer 3 and Edith Piaf 2. So you could say that the choice of songs is not huge, but the principle is excellent. There is a separate ipad edition.
Bonjour de France has gap fill songs to complete, in the same style as LyricsTraining. Songs paus eto give you time to cmplete the blanks. there are three levels of difficulty based on how many words are blanked out.
Lyricstranslate has a huge archive of translated songs in many languages, including songs. A quick search for Francis Cabrel revealed a good number of his songs translated rather well into English. This is a crowd sourcing site so the quality of the translations would need to be carefully checked.
Lyricsgaps has a very useful worksheet tool. You register (free) and then can create quick gapfill worksheets, choosing with a tick box system which words you wish to blank out. The resulting worksheet is quite attractive and can be shared through social media.
Great French Songs is a blog with lyrics translated into English. This could be useful to a teacher who wished to set a retranslation exercise to a class. You hand out the English version, play the song with pauses and get the class to translate back into French. This is a good multi-skill activity. By the way, on the site there is also a grammatical or lexical focus where snippets of the song lyrics are picked out to demonstrate, say, a verb or adverb.
www.chansons-fr.com is the site I blogged about very recently, with its large collections of videos, with songs sorted by theme, linguistic focus and difficulty level. This is the work of a French FLE teacher in Japan. There are a good number of old songs in this collection, but just the lyrics and music, no exercises.
www.redkaraoke.com looks a fun site, but you pay to access the full range of songs, including French ones. subscription starts about 4 USD a week.
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ReplyDeleteI have collected French songs on the blog La chanson du jour - French songs 101
ReplyDeletehttp://blogsofbainbridge.typepad.com/chansons
Thanks for sharing the one above. Some French Canadian singers are on there, including one of my favourites, Robert Charlebois.
DeleteMerci.
ReplyDelete