Learning English through Songs

Lately, I have been thinking a lot about how you can most effectively study foreign languages on your own, independently and without a teacher.

Of course, it's wonderful if you can study with a teacher, but even in such cases the time you spend with the teacher is very small compared to all the hours during the week when you are not in the classroom. I do have students that don't do anything independently during the time they are not studying English with me, but such students naturally fail to make any progress.

There are many things you can do on your own, from studying grammer to reading articles and watching movies. Each of these activities can be useful, but what I'd like to share is something I have found especially effective and productive, and that is learning songs by heart.

Yes, lots of my students listen to songs in English, but not many take the time to learn the lyrics and listen frequently enough to learn the song by heart. It may sound like something tedious and full of drudgery, but it really isn't - it's simple and it's fun.

Before the Internet, if you wanted to learn a song from one of your favorite groups, you had to listen repeatedly and try to write down the words or lyrics to the song. If your language skills were not very high, this was almost impossible - you would have to find somebody to do it for you unless you were lucky to find a CD with printed lyrics.

Next you would have to look up each unfamiliar word in a dictionary - also time-consuming and tedious.

With the Internet, however, it's super simple to look up the lyrics to any song. Moreover, you don't even have to open a dictionary if you use automatic translation services such as Google translate. If you use firefox, there is even a plug-in for Google translate that allows you to right click on any highlighted text and translate the text into the language of your choice. This is an automatic, or machine translation which is bad in most cases and will even make you laugh at how horrible it is, but at least you will see all unfamiliar words translated and get a basic idea of what the song is about. If something still doesn't make any sense, it is most likely an idiom which you can simply use your friend Google to find out what it means.

It's best to think of the song as a cipher or puzzle that you have to decode to find the answer. Time spent deciphering such texts is a useful skill because it is what you do naturally when you learn a languge.

The extra benefit here though is in hearing the natural rhythms of the language in the music and how not just sentences but entire phrases are pronounced.

Ideally, after you understand what the song means, you should listen several times to the song and read along. After that, try listening without reading and see if you can still understand everything. It's best to focus on a stanza at a time at first until you can comfortably understand the entire song without reading along.

After this try singing along with the singer. Afterwords, you can try singing the song on your own karaoke style. This is a very important step because we learn best when we recite or say something aloud. Many polyglots use variations on this method to effectively learn languages. We really learn when we say stuff aloud and train our own ears to hear the language and feel what it means on the oral level.

From time to time, I will be posting some song videos from youtube together with lyrics and some explanations of difficult words and expressions. I hope you will find this useful, helpful and most importantly fun. In addition, if you have any requests, please send me a line or post in the comments.

happy learning!!!