Hey guys welcome to Fingtam Languages
Today's video is gonna be about my method that I use for learning languages through songs
Now if you're new to this channel
I produce a new video every
Monday and every Friday about ways that you can learn languages more
Effectively so if that's interesting to you feel free to click on the subscribe button down below
Now on this channel my three main goals are to make language learning fast fun and easy and I think learning languages through songs
Accomplishes all three of those goals so my first tip for learning languages with songs and this probably comes as no surprise is just
Listening to the song a lot
So listen while you're in the car listen while you're cooking cleaning
Listen while you have any amount of free time and my favorite method for that is the Spotify app on my iPad
They have pretty much every song you can imagine and they have all
kinds of
languages so no matter what languages you're learning you they probably have sons in that language a Spotify app for the iPad and
For the computer is really nice
it's completely free the app for your phone is a little bit more limited unless you want the paid subscription but
On the iPad and on the computer, it's great
You just have to listen to a short advertisement
and then you get to listen to whatever music you want my next tip is to print off a
physical lyrics sheets with a glossary on the side
and that's exactly what I did here you see I have the lyrics printed off, and I just found the lyrics to this song and
Ultimate-guitar.com. After I printed it off
I just went through and read
The whole song and I found a bunch of words that I was not familiar
With so I wrote those songs over here on the side
And then when I finished that and went on to wordreference.com, and I looked up the definitions
And this is a really helpful thing to reference the first few times you hear the song
You just read through the lyrics as you listen to the song one or two times
And then it just takes a few times listening to the song before you know all the words and all their meanings
That's a really easy way to boost your vocabulary and it's going to stop you from getting
Totally lost in the song every time you listen to it
So it's gonna make your time more productive now Google
Translates and word reference can only take you so far
When you're translating words word for word and anyone who speaks Spanish knows that this translation that Google Translate gave me is
Really wrong and really funny
that's why my second piece of advice for learning languages with songs is to ask advice from native speakers on apps like Reddit and
HiNative a lot of times music uses certain phrases and words that are very colloquial
They use a lot of slang so that's why HiNative is a great resource for this. HiNative is an app that
Allows you to ask bite-sized
translation related questions to native speakers, and you can see here I asked a question about a
Line from the song that I'm learning
And I just asked what does this mean because it uses some
slang vocabulary words that I'm just not familiar with and then a native speaker of
Canadian French came on and she told me what that means and you can see that
There's probably a good reason
I had no idea what this means because it was a little bit vulgar and they don't teach you that kind of stuff in the
classroom but
People online that are native speakers, and they're experts in the dialect
They'll help you understand what's going on in that song
So this is an invaluable resource and reddit is also a great place where you can go and ask questions
Just go to the subreddit of whatever language
You're learning post your question and you'll get at least one or two answers
Within the next hour as long as it's one of the more major languages of the world
My third tip is to practice these songs while practicing with an actual
Instrument now if you already play an instrument you probably do this all the time
So this is just a natural extension and another way for you to incorporate your language into your daily routine
And if you don't play an instrument yet
It's actually really easy to get started
You can get a cheap ukulele on Amazon or on eBay for like twenty to thirty dollars
And there's all kinds of tutorials on YouTube that will tell you how to play that
Instrument. Then all you have to do is just look up the chords for that instrument on ultimate-guitar.com
and you instantly have a new and exciting way of practicing your language
This is why I get most of my lyrics off of
Ultimate-guitar.com because they actually give you the chords to go along with the lyrics
And then it's extremely easy just to pick up the guitar
Or sit down at the piano and play through whatever song you want to learn
Just one more suggestion on the instrument front before we get to my last tip is
This instrument called a strum stick and you've probably never seen anything like this before it's really interesting
But I promise this is the easiest instrument you will ever play in your entire life
This is a pretty nice model, and it was a little bit more expensive at about a hundred dollars
But you can get cheaper versions too. There's only three strings on this instruments
and They leave out a bunch of frets making it way simpler to play and it makes it so that you can't even play wrong notes
For the key that you're playing in it's really easy for beginners
Drumstick players to just use one finger in just this one string and you can actually make some pretty cool music
Watch me play La Vie on rows with just one finger on this drumstick
Once you have your strum stick for a few days you can move past the one finger technique and move into very simple
Chords that never take more than two fingers
And believe it or not you can actually play some pretty complicated
Stuff on this strum stick so it's a lot of fun even for advanced musicians. Okay, sorry for that side rant about strum sticks
I'm just really passionate about spreading music, so I'm not gonna say any more about that
But if you are interested in this drumstick then you can check out my link right here because I think I'm going to start posting
More videos on that subject on another channel and my last tip is to listen to those songs in slow motion
And I have two main ways of doing this
The first and the simplest way is on YouTube and the second way that is more complex
But more customizable is with audacity now the first method
I want to show you is how to slow down in songs on YouTube
And I just covered this a week or two ago in my pronunciation video, so I'm not gonna spend too much time on it
But this is a really nice way to slow down videos on YouTube so that you can hear exactly
how the singers are pronouncing their words and
I'm gonna first play this song at regular speed so you can
Really listen to how she pronounces. These are isn't because she has a really interesting way of pronouncing these R's in the song
And see how she has those really
Uvular trilled Rs and that's really interesting, so I'm gonna slow this down a little bit and just get a better listen
If you can't really hear her trilling those Rs when she slows it down and
You want to be careful because if you slow it down too much, then you'll really get
really distorted
Sound so it's funny, you can really hear her doing that vibrato in there.
Now YouTube is good because it's nice and simple you just go to this little thing here, and then you can adjust the speed
But audacity is more powerful, and you'll just go to audacityteam.org
And you have to download this software
but it's free and it's really nice, and I can actually show you an example right now because
Audacity is what I'm using to record the audio as we speak
So I can't show you in a real example because I'm recording it right now
But what you would do is you would go up here and you would import your favorite song
Using open you just open an mp3 version of the song
Then you would highlight it, highlight the portion that you want to slow down or highlight the whole song then you'll go to
Effect and you would go to change speed and I'm in the middle of recording right now, so you can't change the speed
But if you just had a paused
Mp3 then you could change the speed of it, and you can slow it down to 90% or 95%
80% if you want you but you want to find a good balance of where to slow it down
because
Like over here if you slow it down to 75%
That's not too bad, but once you slow it down to 50 that's really distorted. So you want to keep it around
90, 95 maybe
75 is kind of pushing the edges of it
But if you slow it down to 90% you can still listen to that song and enjoy
It's just as a slower version of the song
And there's not too much distortion at that point
So this is just a really nice way of being able to slow down a song and really zoom in and get a good idea
Get a good idea of exactly what the singer is doing and how they're pronouncing the words
So I really hope you guys take the initiative to start using
music to learn languages because I think that's gonna be a big factor in
Helping you become more fluent in your language and before I go
I'm gonna leave you with a video of myself practicing Esperanto on the piano