Aww yeah! Today I'm going to share my favorite tips to learn languages with music!
This topic is definitely my jam and I have lots of experience with it.
Songs are one of my favorite language learning tools!
As you will see in this lesson, they can be a fun and playful way to learn English.
If you watch until the end, you will get 4 fun tips and activities
you can do with songs that will help you:
Make sense of grammatical structures, Expand your vocabulary, Improve your pronunciation,
and of course to increase your fluency! So, turn the volume up, and let's do this.
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So first off they can help you to make sense of grammar.
You don't need to depend only on books to learn grammatical rules.
Songs can also be a fun way to learn or review grammar.
It helps you learn the conjugations and master
verb tenses as they are often repeated over and over again in different songs.
Also, they are a great way to recall the grammar you have
learned. You can try to spot a certain conditional sentence or a relative clause, for example.
So Here's one activity to use a song to help you with grammar.
Choose a song you are already quite familiar with and a verb tense that you feel you need to master.
For example, the simple past, or the participle form.
Get the lyrics of your chosen song and identify all the verbs. I might highlight them in a certain
color for example. This step alone is already a great exercise! But let’s take it a step further!
So now, change all of them to the simple past. At this moment, you are practicing repeating the
form, so don't mind if the lyrics turn out to be a little strange.
Alternate between singing the song with the original verbs and the changed verbs
a couple of times. You'll see that it'll help you remember them much more easily!
You can do the very same activity with pretty much any word family, and change adjectives to adverbs,
add prefixes or suffixes to nouns, play with the opposites of adjectives, and so on.
This might even get you laughing as you will get a pretty silly new version of the song.
The music is really great for expand your vocabulary!
Music is a really powerful workout for your brain as it activates both sides at the same time,
helping increase learning and memory. Take for example that it's mainly through songs
that kids learn their first pieces of vocabulary. Just think about it: The ABC's, parts of the body,
colors, actions. There are songs for all of these that we learn at an early age!
Songs will help you expand your vocabulary. It's not for nothing that Bob Dylan,
a musician, won the Nobel Prize in Literature for his poetic expressions through music.
One of the many good things about learning new words with songs is the fact that they are
presented in context. So, you don't learn isolated items, but rather a particular meaning of a word.
Moreover, oftentimes, you won't even need to look up that word in the dictionary
and will be able to understand it because of its context, the words that came before,
or even the overall tone of the song. Develop a habit of adding the words you learned
to your lexical book or vocabulary app, like Anki, Quizlet, or Memrise, and revisiting them
from time to time. Also, remember to put them into use as soon as you learn them whenever possible.
So, a great exercise for you to start doing this right now is training with the lyrics.
One type of lyrics training is an exercise in which you need to fill in the blanks of a song.
There are two ways to go about it. First is by using the app or website called Lyrics Training
or finding songs activities on CoolEnglish.net. In these websites, the words you'll need to
identify and remember are already chosen for you, although you can choose the level of difficulty
(easy, medium, hard). So it’s great whether you’re a beginner or advanced!
What’s more, it's a good way to practice both listening and vocabulary at the same time.
The other way is to use the principle of lyrics training to help you learn through spaced
repetition, which is a way of learning in which you take the information that you need to memorize
and repeat it across increasing intervals. You get the lyrics of the song,
choose words that are new to you or that you have a hard time remembering,
and take them out of the song any time they appear. After that, you play the song and try
to listen and complete it with those words. After a while, you may increase the challenge and try
to remember the words before listening to the song. This is a great way to train your ability
to recall words, adding them to your active vocabulary. Plus, it’s such a fun challenge!
The key here is to do that in intervals (just like you would with an app like Anki or Memrise).
So for example, you do it first once every day, then every two days, then once a week. This way,
you're "forced" to remember those words from time, so it'll be much
more unlikely that you will forget them. Once you’ve done this with a few songs,
you can just change the song you work on each day. And it will only take you a few minutes!
And I have a question--do you usually get frustrated when you can’t think of the right word?
If you’re like most learners I’m sure you emphatically have said, “YES!!!”
Well I have two suggestions for you. First, check out our Free Masterclass.
In it, you will learn the 3 keys to understanding natives at any speed!
First is Vocabulary - you will learn the vocabulary that we natives
REALLY use in our everyday speech, and we’ll help you to never forget it.
Second is Pronunciation - you will understand and even be able
to imitate how we cut and connect our words Third is Cultural Context - so you will be
able to laugh along with all of the joke But you will not find this masterclass on
YouTube. To get exclusive access you need to click up here or in the description
below to sign up for free. See you there! The second suggestion is to check out this
lesson that Andrea made on our other channel about how to think in English! You will also
find a link to that in the description, and it’s a great lesson to watch next!
When it comes down to it, language is music! Every language has its own rhythm. If you speak English
with the rhythm of your native language, it can make you sound unnatural. Songs tend to
exaggerate the rhythm of the language, so they can be a great tool to help you practice
speaking English with the correct rhythm and flow, while stressing words correctly!
Of course, because of the melody in some songs, there might be slight changes in pronunciation.
This is however the exception, so it should not scare you away from learning with songs.
Most of the time, words that rhyme fall on the same beat (or pulse) of the song
and this certainly helps you identify patterns on how to pronounce such words.
It's also helpful for you to learn how to actually pronounce a word.
Sometimes we learn words by reading and don't know how to pronounce them. Or worse, get bad
habits of pronouncing them incorrectly! Songs will help you with that in a natural and enjoyable way.
Another thing is that songs are enriched with is connected speech and they will
help you notice when and which words are commonly reduced and linked.
One of the benefits of using songs to study is accent reduction.
Have you ever noticed how singers with a very strong British accent like Adele or Ed Sheeran
sound kind of American when they sing? This happens because accents are distinguished
based on the use of intonation, vowel length, articulation, and so on. However, when a person
sings, these aspects are neutralized, as the air flows and the articulation and length of syllables
and sounds tend to become less precise. What’s more, the muscles being articulated
to project the voice of a particular genre, let's say pop music, tend to share the same
features of a neutral American accent. So singing can sort of take your mouth
to the gym because it uses all the parts of your body that produce sound
and helps you exaggerate the difficult phonemes in English that don’t exist in your native tongue.
A good exercise to practice pronunciation, inspired by the Mimic Method, is to first
try to imitate the sounds you hear in the song without caring about the lyrics.
Just say random, invented words (also known as gibberish) in the same rhythm and
melody of the song, if possible. Identify when a word is emphasized, when a sound rises,
and how many sounds there are in a sentence. This will help warm up the muscles so when
you actually pronounce the real words of the lyrics, they fall into place more comfortably.
So if you still aren’t convinced about the benefits of songs for learning
English--let me give you a final reason! Music is bound to help your fluency in general.
As I mentioned, music has been one of my number one language learning tool in most of the 6
languages I have learned. I created playlists in Spotify for each language. I might listen to my
French playlist while cooking, or Catalan playlist while working. By singing along,
I noticed huge differences in the naturalness of my speech when I get into a conversation.
Why is this? Well first, because music
affects our mood and it can help create a better atmosphere for learning. It might sound silly,
but having the right mindset does wonders for our motivation. Which sounds better to you?
Studying lyrics or studying a grammar book? Second, when we like a song, we tend to
stick with it for a while, listening to it on repeat non-stop. Repetition,
even from a passive perspective, is an extremely effective way of increasing memorization.
You can use melodies that you already know or that are stuck in your head and change the lyrics.
Invent your own story to the song, invert the meaning of everything that's being said,
you can create movements to words in the song or to certain momentums.
>>> But, the most important thing is to SING
ALONG! Enjoy the moment! Sing out loud. Be it in your car on the way to work, in
the shower, or my favorite--while cooking dinner! If you want to take it to the next level try this:
Download a program like Audacity (which is free) to edit audio.
Cut the song into small pieces, even just a few seconds. Choose especially the parts
that you find most challenging to imitate. Listen to these bits over and over again.
Once you feel comfortable identifying what’s being said, sing those small bits.
Think of it like reps with a dumbbell that you’d use to make your arms stronger,
but for your muscles of articulation! If this is difficult,
you can also start by slowing down the audio. Then once you get more comfortable, speed it up!
This will help you speak English FASTER! If you want a good challenge,
check out how we broke down Eminem’s song Lose Yourself in this lesson!
By trying this exercise and others that we’ve mentioned today,
before you know it, you’re going to be speaking English clearly and naturally. Aww yeah!
So to wrap up this lesson, I have some lightning recommendations for you
that will make all of this more fun and easier!
So first off, start with songs you like, but that are suitable for learning and for your level.
Don’t choose a song just because a teacher told you it’s a good one
if you don’t like it. Otherwise you will not be motivated and will probably give up.
If you need some help finding a song, a great place to start is with our playlist
of lessons with songs. You can find that by clicking up here and also in the description.
Make sure you have access to the lyrics. I really like Genius Lyrics because you can
also see information about what the song is about, and sometimes this can help you
understand the cultural context of them. As a bonus, print them out, take notes, and mark
them up. Use colors! Be creative! Mix active listening activities,
like the exercises we mentioned with passive listening, that is, listening for pleasure.