So one of my favorite methods for learning languages is by listening to music
Normally, this means passively listening throughout the day, but there are also ways of studying foreign songs during your active study time
so this video is my method for using Memrise to learn languages with song lyrics
It only takes five easy steps that anyone can do as long as you have a computer
The first step is to get a file of the song that you want to use now. I know nowadays
We're moving away from mp3s and towards streaming services
But for this method you're gonna need an actual sound file if you have a CD with a song on it then just important that
Otherwise you can get CDs for pretty cheap on eBay or find somewhere that sells mp3s online
There's also ways of downloading mp3s for free from YouTube videos
But I'm not gonna recommend that because it's illegal. Once you get your sound file, you're gonna need to download a free software called audacity
Go to audacityteam.org and download the version that is appropriate for your computer
Once you have the program installed go ahead and use it to open the sound file of the song you want to use
Now the whole song is going to show up in this graph here the horizontal axis is time and the vertical axis is volume
So you can see which parts of the song are the loudest now
what you're gonna do is go through the whole song and
Separate the individual lines from one another go to the first line and play it one or two times
Paying attention to precisely where the line begins and ends then click just a hair before the line starts
Hold the shift button and then click just after the line ends
Now the whole line should be highlighted and you're gonna export this section as an individual sound file. Now go to file export
and export selected audio I
Recommend labeling your files with the actual lyric itself as well as a number to show what order it comes in
You'll probably have to look up the lyrics online to make sure you're naming your sound files
Accurately. You're gonna need to export all your song lyrics to the same folder
Now only do this for lines with unique lyrics if there are some lines that repeat themselves over and over again
You only need that line one time
another optional trick you can do in audacity is to slow down the song lyrics so that it's easier to hear the
pronunciation
if you do this
I would recommend not slowing it down more than 10 or 15 percent because then it starts to get pretty distorted
Now you're gonna make your own personal deck of flashcards in Memrise if you don't have an account on Memrise yet
You'll need to make one but they're free. So you're good
You're gonna click "create a course" name it and then fill out all the relevant information that you care about
Now we're gonna use Memrise's mass import feature. You're gonna click on "advanced" then "bulk add words"
Copy and paste the lyrics that you found online
Into the window and make sure you hit enter between every line that you want to be a separate flashcard
Otherwise Memrise will just put the whole thing together into one flashcard and you don't want that
once you've created a flashcard for each line of the song you need to pair the original lyric with the corresponding sound file and the translation.
To do this, you're gonna go to "advanced"
Click on "add column" and then you're gonna write "audio" in here
Then you're gonna click audio right there and click "Add"
Adding the sound file is easy. Just click here and then upload the file
This is why I recommend numbering your files earlier so that they show up in the correct order now
Otherwise your computer might show them to you in alphabetical order and then it's just a mess to dig through. In order to
Translate your song lyrics, it's best to get a native speaker to help you, but in a pinch you can use Google Translate
Which usually does a pretty good job. But if you do this,
You will need to cross-check it on wordreference.com and HiNative or some other site that allows you to ask native speakers
I also find that the people on Reddit are really helpful and willing to help me when I have questions about strange song lyrics
Unfortunately, there is no mass import feature for pairing the translation to the original lyrics so you'll just have to do it manually and then
After a while you can make a whole bunch of flashcard decks out of all the songs that you're learning
So for example here is La Vie on Rose, which I was learning a few years ago
And then you see that as soon as the flashcard comes up it'll play the audio you can play it over again
And then and then you can use it to test yourself.
That's it for today if you guys enjoyed the video please like and subscribe, and I'll see you guys in my livestream this Friday