How can Music help you learn a Language? - Part 3: Musical Hacks

IMG credit: www.courtneycarmody.com

The following is the next instalment in my series looking at how music can help you get better in a foreign language. We looked at the way it transports you to the heart of the culture in your target country, and a great method for getting to know new words and practicing structures through song. In the final part, I wanted to share some more ingenious ways to use music for learning with you. These are my musical hacks.

1) Join a choir, sing vocal harmonies

A few years ago, I was in Poland with a group of other travellers and got chatting to a British girl who had studied French and German. We both had good fun trying to pick up a few Polish phrases and others had remarked on our good pronunciation skills. In the course of an evening at the pub, she presented me with the theory that our common hobby of choir singing could have something to do with our pronunciation and copying skills. In fact, to me this has always rung true, and in fact there are scientific studies looking into this "listen and copy" training method.

Your listening and copying skills are invaluable tools for language learning. You will need them to

• become familiar with pronunciation
• develop conversation skills
• get comfortable listening to yourself and others
• apply rules and instructions to produce sounds.

Singing in harmony with other vocal performers trains you to make sure you know the sounds they are producing. So for this musical hack, I recommend that you make your local choir into your new best friends. You will reproduce melodies and ensure that you observe and develop other sound producers (singers, speakers). Some choirs even use sign language to accompany the sung words, and many will feature pieces of music in foreign languages. Not only will it train the essential listen and copy skills, but you'll also learn to sing in a new language.

2) Make up your own jingle

Have you ever come across an earworm? It's a piece or section of music that gets stuck and plays over and over in your head. Use this repetition to practice by singing your vocab and getting that stuck in your head.

Every language has its own rhythm and melody, and building that into your jingle is a powerful thing. If you are feeling a little apprehensive starting this off, try a really well-known song. How about Gangnam Style? Listen here:

That was me practicing some Russian with a song stuck in everyone's head.

Advanced learners

Your option for this could be to translate some lines from your favourite song and sing them in the target language. For inspiration, maybe try the "Call Me Maybe" polyglot video.

Use a microphone or voice recording app to compare your pronunciation to the real speakers', and catch yourself in a moment where you were not worrying about getting it right or wrong because you are too busy trying to sing in time with the music.

3) Jam

Building a "jamming" session into your learning experience is a low-pressure way of letting go and allowing yourself to experiment. You need a little creativity for this, but there are no goals - just have fun and experiment.

Some ideas; Sing a song with your language partner (from Italki or Verbling for example). Learn the days of the week using notes from musical scales. Raid youtube for a foreign language song, use it as your alarm tune for a week, then write down all the words and translate them.

So that's it, I hope you enjoyed these posts as much as I did. As ever, I love hearing from you and if you enjoyed this post, please consider joining my newsletter crowd!

Further Reading

• 7 reasons why you should sing to learn languages.. by Benny Lewis
• Language Learning Tip: Use Music to Learn a Foreign Language by The Everyday Language Learner
• Tools to Learn Spanish #2 – Practicing Spanish with Lyrics Training on Fair Languages
  

Four Secret Weapons of Practice

Ah, learning, so hardwired into us and yet so difficult! The OED tells us that there are three ways to learn: by study, experience, or being taught. I think there's one thing that they've forgotten. The key ingredient to any new knowledge and skill: practice.

Gets you fit if nothing else.

I hope that the word "practice" doesn't sound disheartening to you. You're not meant to feel like you are rolling that rock back up the hill endlessly like Sysiphos. To me, effective practice means finding a safe environment to try something you've not tried before and then repeating your new trick until it feels effortless. No doubt this can become more than a bit tedious, but you can cut down on boredom by using a few smart techniques

1) Respect Frustration

Sorry! Hope you didn't think I was going to pretend there's a technique that eliminates irritation. Frustration is an unavoidable part of getting better. If you want to succeed, you need to become very aware of points at which you are frustrated. Perhaps make a little note of what it was that really made you feel stuck. Frustration can be such a killjoy that it's caused more than one great learner to just quit the whole endeavour, and no one really wants that! You have to respect that annoying feeling enough to know when it's not worth fighting against a setback.

No need to abandon the practice session, but you can minimise disappointment by repeating the things you're good at. Just give it a day or two and settle the foundations of what you have learnt, and you will find that problem you were facing before has shifted into perspective while you were away. Take a fresh look at things, perhaps get an expert's view or a new demo to bring back the inspiration, and hopefully you'll be right back on your way. And sometimes, there's nothing but a day off that will help you back onto your tracks.

2) Surprise Yourself

Morning! Time for être in the conditionnel, come on!

Mastering a new skill is about becoming so familiar with it that you could do it "in your sleep". I remember our French teacher always talking about how she wants us to be able to rattle down those verb tables even if she wakes us up at 2 in the morning. It's got to get into the head somehow, so make sure that you are really surrounded by your learning material. The easiest way of making this happen in language learning is to write a sentence or two on a sticky note, make 10 copies and stick them everywhere. My favourite places are in the shower (with a plastic wallet), on the bathroom mirror, on the door of your washing machine, in the chocolate drawer and right in the middle of the cork board.

3) Find the Rhythm

The link between music and learning has been explored by researchers and polyglots alike. Music is a very popular teaching tool in kids at primary/nursery school age, but you can also exploit it for your own benefits. If you build a few songs into your learning routine, you'll very soon realise how much more fun it makes it. Don't laugh, but I learnt at least 3 new Russian words from this. You can find examples of musical practice online, for example through Fluency MC or a language hack advocated by Benny Lewis. There are so many advantages to putting music in your learning, for example it makes it more fun, brings you closer to real life use of the target language, helps you remember things through melodies and rhythms and sticks in your head.

4) Get Physical

Movement is another great memory aid because it engages more than one part of your brain. The easiest way you can build this into your learning is to simply sit down with pen and paper (remember my love of the notebook..) and write out those verb tables and vocabulary lists. Maybe write the difficult ones in a different colour, or in capitals. If you want to take it a bit further, why not try and associate the word or sentence with a gesture, like in sign language? It works from "If you're happy and you know it.." to acting out whole bits of dialogue in your book or favourite show.

Get started with really easy exclamations, for example what would you do to illustrate these French expressions:

Au secours!

Je m'écrie! (Je chuchote.)

Je marche.

All of these ideas are designed to help you repeat what it is that you are practising without getting too bored. You may not find that each method works for you, but hopefully you'll have a laugh along the way. It would be great to hear if you guys have found any other ways of building fun repetitions into your learning.

For some other ideas and thoughts, you could these links.

• Learn Language by Repetition on Master Any Language
• Learning Languages whilst Exercising on Fairlanguages
• Learning a Foreign Language is like learning a Sport on The Atlantic

*note use of speechmarks here because I have no clue how that even works