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