One of the best ways to improve your pronunciation in English
is to include music in your study routine. Here’s what we are going to cover in today’s video:
Why music is great to improve pronunciation
Tips to effectively improve your English with music
A fun music quiz to test your listening and pronunciation
But before we start, here at RealLife English, every week we make lessons that help you go
from being a LOST and INSECURE English LEARNER to being a NATURAL, CONFIDENT English SPEAKER.
Why is music great to improve pronunciation? With music, you get to imitate/emulate your
favorite singers. We call this mimicry. Mimicry is a powerful technique that many successful learners
have used to improve their pronunciation. And it is quite simple: All you have to do is listen
closely to a song and repeat the words and phrases as close as possible to what you hear.
Let’s see Thiago, one of our team members demonstrating with the song “Stand by Me”.
Pretty cool, isn’t it? If you feel a bit silly doing this, don’t worry, it’s
part of the process! Just have fun with it! Another reason why music is great to improve
pronunciation is the emotional connection it promotes. Music is able to access parts of
the brain that words can’t. Music also has the power to make us feel a wide range of emotions.
Depending on the song we’re listening to, music can make us feel happy, excited,
thoughtful and even a bit sad. Because of that, music makes it easier for you to learn new
sounds and even vocabulary. We tend to remember things more easily when there’s emotion involved.
Also, songs usually have a chorus, which is the verse that is repeated multiple times throughout
the song. This repetitive nature that music has is great for working out your articulators.
Here’s a simple 3-step process to practice English with music:
Don’t worry about getting the lyrics right at first.
Instead, focus on the melody, stress and rhythm first. You can hum, or go na-na.
Pay attention to how the voice goes up and down as you’re singing.
Analyze how certain words and phrases are pronounced.
You probably know by now that we talk about connected speech quite often on this channel.
Learning connected speech patterns will enhance your listening skills considerably. Listening
to music is an amazing way to pick up connected speech patterns. Plus, when you sing in English,
you will naturally use connected speech, which also benefits your pronunciation.
Just for you to have an idea, I have some musician friends who don’t really speak
English, but when they sing in English, their pronunciation is perfect! Interesting, isn’t it?
When trying to improve your pronunciation with music,
just focus on the sounds, nothing more. Then, you can come back to it another time just to
focus on actually understanding the lyrics and learning new vocabulary.
Imitate and sing along. Once you’ve spent some time on steps 1 and
2, now it’s time for you to actually sing the song. Don’t worry if you’re not a very good
singer. The goal here is not to sound good, but to practice your English pronunciation,
remember? You can even work on memorizing the lyrics to your favorite songs in English!
Besides, you can apply what you learn with music in your actual
speaking when having conversations with people. And you can do that with our RealLife English app!
This is the only place where anytime, anywhere you can just press a button and
start practicing your English with other English speakers from around the world.
You can have fascinating conversations about your life, your passions, culture,
or even about your favorite kind of music! This will take you from feeling like a lost
and insecure English learner to being a confident and natural English speaker.
And that’s not all. You can listen to our podcast with a full interactive transcript
and vocabulary definitions.
So download it now for free by clicking up here or down in the description below.
Or you can just look for RealLife English in your favorite app store.
Listening & Pronunciation Practice In the last part of the video, we’ll do a fun
quiz with music. First, you will listen to short segments of famous songs in English. Then, you
will be asked questions related to pronunciation, connected speech and listening comprehension.
And to help us with that, we’ve invited another one of our team members,
also Thiago, to sing some songs for you. Ready? Let’s begin!
Question 1 - Aerosmith (Dream On)
Listen and fill in the blanks:
Notice how Thiago sings the last phrase
“How to win”. He sings “How duh win”. This is a common reduction in spoken English.
Next, let’s listen to the hard rock classic “Highway To Hell” by
AC/DC. Try to understand the meaning of the selected phrases.
You can also learn a lot of great vocabulary and expressions with music.
The phrase “Leave me be” means “don’t bother me”, or “leave me alone”. To “take everything
in your stride” is an idiom that means to calmly deal with a problem or difficulty.
In this song, Thiago is singing with two connected speech patterns. Can you identify them?
The connected parts here are “feel it” and “the heat is on”. In the first one, notice that the
letter “L” is joined with the vowel “i” in “it”, so we hear “fee-lih”. In the second phrase, “the
heat is on”, the final T in “heat” is pronounced with a flap T sound, which then connects to the
vowel “i” in “is”, so we hear “hee-diz”. Then, the S in “is” has a Z sound, which then connects
to the vowel “o” in “on”, “i-zon”. Putting it all together, we hear “the hee-di-zon”.
How would you pronounce this phrase?:
Notice that the “T + Y” combination in “Don’t you” has a chuh sound, “Don-chu”.
Also, notice that the final T in “forget” is pronounced with a flap T sound, duh,
which then connects to the vowel “a” in “about”, “duh-bout”. Then, the final T in
“about” is pronounced as a stop consonant, “uh-bouh”. Pouting it all together, we have
We’re just focusing on pronunciation here, but you can also learn some grammar with
music. For example, even though the word “everybody” means more than one person,
we treat it as a singular word. That’s why we say “everybody wants” instead of “everybody want”.
This was just a sample of how much you can improve your pronunciation and listening skills
with music. But now we want to hear from you: Share the name of your favorite song
down in the comments and, who knows, we might even make a listen with your favorite song.
In this video you learned:
Why music is great to improve pronunciation
Tips to effectively improve your English with music
Plus, we had tons of fun with a listening
and pronunciation practice quiz in the end. I hope you enjoyed today’s lesson.
If you want to keep learning about how you can improve your pronunciation,
why not watch this lesson next?