GenZedong

I've never written anything here before, I'm just a lurker tbh lol but I think I can help you a little, I started learning mandarin in 2024 so it's been 2 years now and since then I've made some mistakes and some stuff I got right, I'll write about the songs first then I'll write about the language after, btw the music recs I'll give are not necessarily so you learn with them (many have complex lyrics), I'm supposing you just want to know more about chinese music, another user gave a better answer in case you want music to learn the language.

If you are an r&b fan then you're lucky bc that's half of chinese music since the late 90s or so, there's quite a lot of rock and other genres too though, pretty much every early Jay Chou song is good (mostly r&b), listen to his Fantasy album and see if you like it (especially the first 3 tracks which are my favorite ones), but pls dont learn mandarin by listening to his music, there's actually a joke that not even chinese people understand much of what he used to sing at the time lmao, there are many rock/dream pop artists like Faye Wong, maybe I'm too biased but there's almost no bad song in her discography (maybe except for her songs from the 80s, I dont listen to those so I dont know), listen to the entire Fuzao album made by her if you dont mind listening to albums, but if you just want one song then I'd say 感情生活 which it's an alt rock gothic rock inspired song, if you like dance-pop then listen to Magician by Lexie Liu, if you like the more soul inspired part of r&b then listen to 飛機場的10:30 by David Tao, for more rock albums there's bands like JaJaTao and Omnipotent Youth Society which both have highly acclaimed rock albums, I didn't listen to it yet but I heard Soft Lipa (rapper) is considered one of the best hip hop artists which lyrics are in mandarin so it's probably worth if you like hip hop. I'm just giving broad recs, if you particularly like anything a lot, tell me.

Now for my unsolicited tips regarding the language lol, I'd say use Anki, or any similar flashcards app, it can be either sentence decks or vocabulary decks (many great decks are shared by the community), I like vocabulary decks but some people swear sentence decks are better, but please dont make the same mistakes as I did and dont spend 90% of your study time on flashcards, I'm pretty good at reading mandarin and recognizing Hanzi characters, I can read most sentences that people write in chinese social media, but I'm very bad at actually listening and understanding what people say bc I completely neglected on actually training the ears with podcasts with transcripts and just started doing it this year, also if you're not gonna live in China I think its almost useless to know handwriting, so don't stress over that, unless you find it's the best way for you to memorize hanzi.

Don't use Duolingo, if you want to use a Duolingo-like app then Hellochinese is even better than that for mandarin and the design is even kinda similar iirc, I didnt use it too much though honestly so its not necessary but many love it, say it's fun and even prefer it to any other apps so maybe you're that type of person so it can be a huge plus.

One thing that I thought was useless so it delayed my learning by a lot was that at first I didnt care about tones, I used to read any word without pronouncing the correct tones, and after learning almost 1k hanzi I had to relearn it all again from 0, seriously, memorize the tones for every hanzi you learn, and some months from now I'd advise you to learn some of the basic tone sandhi rules and have them on mind, imo they're not too important right at the beginning but they're more important later. Don't stress over them too much either though bc it doesnt make you difficult to understand if you forget some tone sandhi rules when speaking, all of this might look overwhelming but by the end of the year you'll realize it was easier than it sounded, as you said learn it a little every day. Sorry for writing too much lol

music with the intention of learning chinese? i'm not sure about that, but ultimately i wouldn't recommend since tones aren't used when singing songs and so it requires a lot more contextual information to understand what's actually being said. i would recommend starting with simple listening practice of people speaking: peppa pig is a popular starting point. but, making it a daily habit is the most important part! i haven't been great about studying for quite a while haha

Do you have any suggestions to music I could listen to?

This channel has quite a few songs with lyrics in Pinyin and Characters while it plays:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8k4o6oZ3ce4&list=PLBwqeFGNGi1BTR1l-aciAjo6KpppAbtiY

Nice

Nice, I was there myself

Thank you. I'm planning to do a North Africa tour in the future, I'll make sure to visit there as well!