春天在哪里 (Chūntiān Zài Nǎlǐ): "Where Is Spring?" — A Chinese Children's Song

Quick answer: 春天在哪里 (Chūntiān Zài Nǎlǐ, "Where Is Spring?") is a gentle, image-rich Chinese children's song about searching for spring in green hills and forests — full of concrete, learnable nouns like flowers, grass, and birdsong, which makes it a good song for building early vocabulary alongside melody.

The lyrics

Chinese	Pinyin	English
春天在哪里呀	Chūntiān zài nǎlǐ ya	Where is spring, oh,
春天在哪里	Chūntiān zài nǎlǐ	Where is spring?
春天在那青翠的山林里	Chūntiān zài nà qīngcuì de shānlín lǐ	Spring is in those green, lush hills,
这里有红花呀	Zhèlǐ yǒu hónghuā ya	Here there are red flowers,
这里有绿草	Zhèlǐ yǒu lǜcǎo	Here there is green grass,
还有那会唱歌的小黄鹂	Hái yǒu nà huì chànggē de xiǎo huánglí	And a little oriole that knows how to sing.

Where it comes from

Unlike several of the older folk chants in this collection, 春天在哪里 has a known author: it was composed by Gu Jianfen (谷建芬), one of the most influential composers of modern Chinese children's and school music, whose songs have shaped Chinese elementary music education since the 1980s. The song became especially well known as the theme song of the 1990 Chinese children's film 四个小伙伴 (Four Little Friends), in which a group of children search the countryside for signs of spring. It has since settled into the standard repertoire of Chinese kindergarten and elementary music classes, alongside other Gu Jianfen songs from the same era.

The lyrics work like a gentle scavenger hunt — spring isn't described abstractly, it's located in specific, visible things: green hills, red flowers, green grass, a singing bird. That concreteness is part of why the song holds up well as a teaching tool, not just a tune.

How to sing it with your baby

• Newborn – 6 months: Sing it near a window, on a walk in the stroller, or anywhere outside — the melody is soft and rises and falls gently, which makes it a nice addition to a wind-down or outdoor-time rotation even before baby understands any of the words.
• 6–18 months: Use it as a pointing game. As you sing about 红花 (hónghuā, "red flowers") and 绿草 (lǜcǎo, "green grass"), point to real flowers, grass, or even pictures of them in a book. Babies at this age are building the link between a word and the thing it names, and this song hands you several concrete nouns in a row to work with.
• 18 months+: Ask "春天在哪里?" ("Where is spring?") as a real question before you sing the answer, and see if your toddler will point to something green or flower-like outside. You can extend the game seasonally — asking where summer, autumn, or winter are, using whatever's actually outside your window.

Continue building your song list

This is one of the songs in the collection of Chinese lullabies and nursery rhymes on Twiglet Tales — browse the full set for more songs at every stage, or see the Growth Roadmap for a staged plan beyond songs alone.