I have found a great new online tool (well, a game really) for practicing English and I want to share it with you all!

The tool, is a website I think you should check out, called Lyrics Training.  This website allows you to watch a music video, while listening to the song, and seeing the lyrics written out.  What is interesting, and what makes this a tool/game, is that some of the words in the lyrics are missing and you have to fill in the blanks to keep listening.  What a great way to practice your listening skills, right?

Here is the website address: http://www.lyricstraining.com/ .

Unfortunately, I don’t find the site to be as straightforward or user friendly as I would like it to be.  So I wanted to give you some tips on how to use this site so you can enjoy it and use this tool to practice your English.

After going to the website above…

To start you need to pick a song to listen to.  You can do this by typing in the box that says ‘Search for lyrics, by artist, or whatever’ found at the top center of the homepage.  If you don’t find the song you are looking for right away by doing a search, scroll down the homepage.  You will see different songs you can choose from in the ‘Recently Played’ and ‘Most Played (Today)’ areas.  It might just be easiest to select a song that you see in one of these areas as the first song you try to listen to and play the game with.

If you click on a song from the ‘Recently Played’ or ‘Most Played (Today)’ area you will be taken to a new webpage where the music video you selected will start playing.

It is now that you need to select the level at which you want to play this listening game.  You can select from: Beginner, Intermediate or Expert by clicking on one of these words below ‘Select Game Mode’.  I suggest starting out as a Beginner.

Once you select your level, the music video will start over and you will see words (the lyrics to the song) written out directly below the video (in a light blue box).  You will notice that some of the words are missing.  Instead of words there are a series of dots where the word should be.  These dots represent the words you have to listen for and fill in.  Each dot stands for one letter, so this is a little hint for you to figure out what the missing word might be.

The music video will play until the end of a line where there is a missing word, then it will stop.  You have to type in the correct word in order for the music video to continue.  If you did not hear the word correctly the first time, don’t worry, you can press the ‘delete’ button on your keyboard and that line will play again.  You can play the line again and again, by pressing ‘delete’ as many times as you want, until you figure out the word.  If you can’t figure out the word and you want to move on, you can press the ‘tab’ key and move to the next line.  As soon as you type the right word, the song moves along on it’s own.

When a video/song is finished you can see your score.  You can also see the time it took you to complete the game, the number of words you typed correctly, and then number of words you skipped.  These are all tallied bellowed the lyrics.  Also, the website will give you a score for your effort.  The score is figured out by multiplying the number of words you typed correctly by a specific number of points per word.

I hope you have fun exploring this website, listening to songs, and practicing your English.  Let me know what you think about this tool by leaving a comment below.  You could also let us all know your highest score after you play a few times :).