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Benvenuti, Bienvenue, Croeso and Welcome.
Hi, I’m Juliet. Join me on my language learning journey and discover my thoughts on different aspects of language learning with the A Language Learning Tale Podcast. Today, the subject is:
LET’S SING ALONG
Or
USING SONGS TO HELP WITH LANGUAGE LEARNING
Okay, exactly how can songs help you learn languages? You might be surprised, but there are many ways songs can help improve your level in a foreign language.
First, let’s talk about pronunciation. When you’re new to a language, pronunciation is one of the most difficult things to tackle. You need something approaching correct pronunciation even to say the words in your head. If you don’t have that, it’s like reading a fantasy novel and knowing that you’re probably getting all the character and place names wrong. In that situation it doesn’t matter, with a language, it does.
Let’s think about that in more detail. There may be sounds in your target language that are very unfamiliar to you and which you have a hard time getting your tongue and teeth around. You might end up pronouncing a word more like you would if it were in your own language, because you just can’t do it. This is understandable, but you need to try to correct the pronunciation before it gets too fixed in your brain. How can songs help you with this? Well, here’s the caveat. You need to choose songs where the singer pronounces the words quite clearly. Not every word, that’s almost an impossibility with most songs, but most of the words. Why should be obvious. You’re going to use this as a model.
To start with, you’re probably only going to want to listen to the music, preferably with the lyrics in front of you, so on something like Spotify or YouTube music. As you listen you’ll get used to the phrasing and the speed and the rhythm of the language before you can start imitating, also known as singing along.
Once you’re familiar with a song, you can try to sing along as it plays. At first, it will likely be too fast for you, even if it seems slow, and you will get all tongue-tied at points. So, perhaps concentrate on a chorus first, where the word combinations get repeated a number of times and then move on to the rest. This process, I guess, is somewhat akin to shadowing, because you’re always going to be a step behind when you start out. The more familiar you become with the song, and the more times you do it, the easier this will be and you will be able to keep up. It will help you with what you might find to be awkward combinations of vowels, or any other combinations in your target language. Repetition really does work with this and it certainly fixes it in my brain.
Now, this is the stage where you’re progressing and you can really try to concentrate on the individual words and practice pronouncing them exactly like the singer does. This is exactly how I got used to the ‘e’ sound at the end of a word in Italian. I was pronouncing it in a more English way, but after singing along with some songs I eventually began to get that more clipped sounding ‘e’. (I know there’s a technical term for that, but let’s not use that, because most people don’t know those terms, including me.) I don’t manage to produce it every time, but I know how to and that’s half the battle.
So, you’re now well on your way to better pronunciation in the language and have ironed out those tricky issues, what else can a song bring you? And you might even want to do this first. Well, for this task, I would suggest that you choose songs with more of a general life topic, rather than just the I’m in love, or I’m having a break-up type of songs, because those are somewhat limiting. Can you guess what I’m going to say? Well, first, I know you can get translations of songs online, but you’re not going to do that, are you? You’re going to translate the words yourself, because that’s how you get the benefit. So, get your dictionary set up and open up a document, or your notepad and get writing. The translation doesn’t have to be perfect, but you should be able to get at the basic meaning. If you want to go and check an online translation afterwards, then do that, but be aware that some of them are very much Google translations that might get things wrong.
Of course, now you know the meaning of the song, there’s something else you’re getting out of this exercise and that’s vocabulary. And do you know what kind of repetition of vocabulary tends to fix it in your brain? Yes, singing along. You’re not technically learning by rote, but you are learning it by repeating it, but in a much more enjoyable way than using a spaced repetition app. At least, I think so.
That’s all for today’s episode. Don’t forget to join me again next time, for more language learning tips, tricks and tales and in the meantime, check out the A Language Learning Tale YouTube channel for additional, non-podcast content.
Ciao, salut, hwyl and bye for now.