Use Music to Learn a Foreign Language
Learning a foreign language is a great way to communicate with people in another culture. Learning to express yourself in a foreign language can be challenging because of the complexity of a different language's rhythm and syntax. Using music is a great way to help you learn a foreign language and retain that information. With a little patience, a lot of creativity, some music and practice, you will soon surprise yourself at your foreign language proficiency.
Instructions
1. Choose your foreign language. Keep in mind that many languages are related by language families, such as the Romance languages (French, Spanish, Latin, Portuguese) and Germanic languages (English, German, Danish, Icelandic). Learning a language within the same family can help you more easily learn each one because they share many similar traits, including phonology and morphology.
2. Set your background music. Studying to certain music, particularly classical chamber music, can help enhance your ability to retain information and increase your short-term spatio-temporal abilities. This is not just limited to Mozart's music, Bach's Brandenburg Concertos have been shown to work as well. The thought is that the rhythm and increasingly complex themes in the music increase the neural pathways associated with learning and retention.
3. Find music in your chosen language, particularly children's music. Listening and immersing yourself in a foreign language is helpful when learning. Children's music is great because it often helps to teach basic concepts like counting, body parts, time and manners. It's okay if you don't understand all the words of the foreign songs--eventually you'll learn more words and can work out the meaning for yourself. Don't read the translations, figure it out.
4. Set your studies to music. If you cannot find existing music in your chosen language, set your words to music. Start simple with vocabulary words, numbers and the alphabet. The alphabet song can be used for many languages and will help you get a better handle on properly pronounce the letters and sounds. Counting can be fun--try singing numbers 1-27 set to Bill Haley's "Rock Around the Clock." Try songs like Happy Birthday, Twinkle Twinkle Little Star and Where is Thumbkin. Try substituting the vocabulary words you're trying to learn into popular songs that you already know and love.
5. Add complexity to your songs. Once you've mastered the basics, add conversation to your songs. You can start with something simple like verb tenses and pronouns--that's a great way to get them memorized and use them properly. For example, "I play, you play, he/she/it plays, we play..."
6. Get conditional. A great way to work out sentence structure is to add conditional phrases to your sentences. This is particularly helpful in mastering these phrases because in many languages, the verb is moved to the end of a sentence when a conditional phrase is used. For example, you could make up a song with, "I play, but you do not play." Play around with your verb tenses, practice opposites, sing along. It will seem hard at first and you'll mess up a lot, but keep practicing and you'll get it. Conditional phrases are challenging and if singing a tune will help you get them correct, you will have instantly stepped up your language proficiency to a much higher level.
Tags: foreign language, many languages, chosen language, language proficiency, Learn Foreign, Learn Foreign Language