Using songs to learn languages
I know that it is good to use music to learn languages and I am trying to improve my French this way but the only thing I can think to do is listen to a song and translate the parts I don't know.
What do you guys do and is it helpful?
12 Comments
That sounds like a great idea! I listen to a lot of songs in Spanish and then I try to memorize them and there meanings! It is very helpful! Have a nice day!!
If I listen to foreign music it is typically Brazilian. I see that you are level 4 in that. I like to listen to Slow Tempo Brazilian Samba. A good way to listen to that is to look up JaBig on Youtube. He has a Slow Tempo Brazilian Samba Video. Sorry, I can only tell you about Portuguese, but I hope you find it useful.
My favorite music band sing in German. I have learned any expressions this way.
Well, I get the lyrics and the translation together. So I can also learn some expressions... And it also helps me with the pronunciation and vocabulary.
And I also try to learn the lyrics, so that it is harder to get out of my mind.
Long ago when I took Spanish in high school our teacher made a class activity out of transcribing (not translating) songs.. He played the song, we each wrote as much as we could, we compared notes, then he played the song again. Repeat until we either got the whole song or we ran out of time. We learned vocabulary, how Spanish speakers actually say things, and we trained our ears. It was fun. It was great.
Hi Qiunnn,
yes, it definitly helps. Not just the translation you also get a good feeling for the language. I started translating songs when I was a teenager and it helped me to get access to the language. It became a kind of hobby to me. When I started learning spanish I immediately I looked around for spanish lyrics. And again it works! As jimnicholson wrote lyricstraining.com is a perfect site for music junkies (like me) to learn a language.
best regards Angel
In French songs and poetry, there is the case where mutes are pronounced. So a lot of things don't sound right.
For example, if you listen to étoile in spoken french, and then in song, you will notice the difference. The song version sounds better to me: aye-twah-luh where the mute 'e' is pronounced, versus aye-twall in spoken.
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I listen to popular songs in my target language and save the ones I like on Spotify, but you can do the same thing with any streaming service or youtube. I listen to each song and try to understand as much as possible, and then I look up the lyrics (untranslated) to see if I missed anything or got something wrong. Then I look up any words I don't know, and if necessary I look up a translation of the whole song.
The songs I fully understand get saved to a playlist that I sing along to in the car to practice pronunciation.
