۴ گام برای یادگیری زبان با استفاده از موسیقی ها

Learning English with Music

Tip#1

Alright, so the first expert tip is that you are going to need to choose a good song for learning, one that has a good rhythm, that you love listening to, that you are curious to know some of the vocabulary and stuff.

And depending on the difficulty of the song and your level, you might go really deep with learning with the song, or it might be something that you can do rather quickly.

So what I like to do is actually print out the lyrics, and mark it all up with a pen, a highlighter, because for me I learn better when I do things with my hands.

But, you might choose to do some of this on the computer, with a pen, but I’ll be showing you how I did this in this very video in just a minute.

It’s important that you come up with a system for symbols for breaking down this music, so for example, you might underline the different vocabulary, you might square some vocabulary that you recognize but you need to add it to your active vocabulary, you could circle some different grammar, that you’re wanting to check out, either that you have no idea about-you don’t know what that conjugation is, or that you recognize but you’re wanting to look at a little bit deeper in this context because it’s something maybe you’ve had a problem with, for example, a conditional, subjunctive, that are really difficult tenses.

By the way, if that’s you that has a problem with conditional, check out this video that we have up at the top.

And then you’re also going to be really training your ear because you’re going to go through while listening to the song, and try to mark together any connected speech, any odd pronunciation, or anything that isn’t pronounced the way that you’d expect it to be.

You can even start to mark the different flow and rhythm of the song, like where are the stresses at.

It’s going to depend on how good your English is, and how much of an ear for music you have-personally I am not the best at this in other languages, but I tend to find that I can pick it up rather naturally by listening to the song a lot.

So it’s really important that you unwrap your curiosity, that is, that you really bring out the inner-scientist within you.

And you really have to focus during this process so that you can really catch all those little subtitles of the language.

Really take note of any interesting collocations, any odd use of expressions or slang, or even some different grammatical rules-is it being used flexibly?

Is it being broken, is it just for the song, or is this something that natives do all the time?

And when you start to do this, you’re really focusing on it, you’re going to start seeing this all over the place, so maybe you’ll listen to song, and then you’re watching a TV series and you see this expression used in the TV series.

And that’s going to really help you a ton with remembering and starting to use everything that you’re learning.

Alright, so let’s get our hands dirty!

Let’s look at an actual example of this with Ed Sheeran’s song “Sing”.

Alright, so I’m here with some different color pens and the lyrics that I have printed out beforehand.

And we are just going to go through and break these down a little bit.

So the easiest place to start I would say is by going through, and first quickly identifying what is the vocab and expressions that you don’t know.

So, we can just glance through this, and I already see some that might be difficult for most learners.

For example, maybe Glass , you’ve heard that before, but you’re not exactly sure if that means like a cup or does it mean like a “window” glass?

So maybe we could a put like a square around that to mark that it is something that we have seen before, but we might want to revise or add it to Anki or other vocabulary memorization software to be able to review it later and add it to our active vocabulary.

And then we’ll just go through like underlining some other ones that could be difficult, so, disappear for example, getting ahead of the program, what could that mean?

no-man’s land, set the tone, sounds like an expression.

Get involved, rushing, from head to toe.

And then this part is especially complicated, so we have, blaze, flames, fire brigade, local rave, and so on.

So the next, maybe we’ll go through it and look for some interesting grammatical structures, some things that either we recognize and we’re are just trying to look at it in the context

Or something that maybe we don’t recognize and we need to look up what is that.

So, start here- I’ve been sat.

So, maybe I’ll put a circle around that to mark that it is something that I am not quite sure why do we say “I’ve been sat,” and not “I’ve been sitting” or “I am sitting with you.”

This is actually grammatically quite a weird structure, so if you saw that and you found it a bit confusing, for me as well it seems like a bit of a strange structure that he used here.

And then we see would here, so we might wonder, “is that conditional?”, and I’ll probably circle this whole thing because it’s with Wish, so it’s a wish-“we wish they would disappear,” so that’s like a bit of a subjunctive there.

And then we also have could here which we know it’s another conditional tense, so we’d circle that.

And that all kind of goes together- “I wish they would disappear so we could get down now.”

And maybe, we saw get down as another phrasal verb, so we underline that.

And then we come down, and we see “until then we got nothing to say.”

So “we got,shouldn’t that be “we have got?”

And you might just circle that so that you can look into that later and maybe you’ll ask, like, your teacher, or you’ll just do some investigation online.

And then the next thing I might want to do-just because obviously this is getting quite full of different, like underlines and circles and squares-is,I’ll take one of these colors that I’ve got, and I would actually listen to the song,

Maybe even listening to it on 0.5x or 0.75x and highlighting some of the different things.

So, just to give you an example of that, and then we’ll actually look at the pronunciation in a little bit, we see here wanna, so he doesn’t say “want to”, he says “wanna”.

And maybe you know what that means, or maybe you need to look it up.

And then just to give you a couple more examples that I already looked up in the song, and that we will listen to in a minute, want you that become “wan-chew,” most likely.

And hold your body, that D and Y might become a “jyu,” so it becomes “hol-jyour”.

And, just a last example, how this step into, he actually connects that, so he doesn’t say “step into,” he says “ste-pinto.”

Example : Maybe we could get down now

I don’t want to know

I don’t wanna to know.

To hol-jyour (hold your) body close

Take another ste-pinduh d’ (step into the) no-man’s land

For the longest time, lady

I need you darling.

And if I wanted to go even deeper with this, I might start actually writing over here some different definitions, any notes that I find, and I can actually have a really good lesson right on one piece of paper with these lyrics, and this whole thing maybe would take you 10 or 15 minutes.

So, just to give you an example of this, I might take this term no-man’s land, and take note that I looked that up and it means “a place where people can’t live,” Like a desert or something.

And then maybe I’ll take some notes how can I remember “no-man’s land,” I might try to connect it to something in my native language, or try to think of a song or something that will help me remember that.

And I’m also going to do things like adding it to my Anki, or Memorise, vocabulary software, and add some examples, add pictures, anything else that’s going to help me to remember this and add it to my active vocabulary.

Alright, in this process I’m giving you, be sure to adjust it to work well with your personal process.

You’re going to want to experiment with it, play with it, you’re probably going to even want to listen to the song a couple of times when you’re trying to catch the pronunciation because, of course, the first time you’re going to miss things.

And if you’d like another example of this, I actually wrote an article a while back explaining my process for doing this with a song in French, so you can find exactly what I did right up at the top.

Alright, so tip#1 was obviously the biggest, hairiest one, we’ve gotten through it, and just hang in there because these next 3 tips are really going to help you to round out the entire process and take your English to the next level with music.

Learning English with Music:

Tip#2

You need to be using some sort of vocabulary memorization software if you’re not already.

I previously mentioned Anki, Memrise, Quizlet, and there’s so many of these out there.

A really great alternative to Anki that I use on my iPhone actually is Flashcards Deluxe because Anki has a really expensive app on iPhone, although it is free on Android.

So, depending on the different costs, you might choose something different.

Memrise is also free.

And another quick tip here is that you want to always be learning the words not just individually, but in context.

So, you’re going to want to take the entire collection that you found.

So, just to look at an example from this song- We learned the word “rushing” so I’m not just going to put “rushing” into Anki and put the definition.

I’m going to put that and give the context of it.

So, in this song, he says “feel it rushing through you.”

Now, that’s going to help you so much more to learn how to use these words in context.

If you just learn the word, you might have some trouble actually being able to use these in your everyday speech.

Plus, a lot of times you’ll often have other words, other prepositions, for example, that are used with it.

A really great example that I use all the time with my Spanish-speaking students is it’s not “think in,” it’s “think about”.

So, if you saw for example “think”, and you put in your Anki, you’ll want to put “think about something” because you want to remember that you always put those two together.

Learning English with Music Tip#3:

Alright, so Tip #3:

You want to actually create a playlist of all of the songs that you are learning English with.

I actually have one of these on Spotify, which I absolutely love Spotify because it helps me discover so much new music.

You can find different pre-made playlists, for example you might want to look at the top songs right now in the United States, or in Australia, and it can really be great for finding the songs that you are going to learn the language with.

And I have a playlist on Spotify for each language, so I have, you know, my French music, my Portuguese music, my Catalan music, my Spanish music, and I’ll be in different moods, and I might throw on a different one for my learning.

And the key here is repetition, we want to have playlists of these so that we can break down these songs, really learn with them, and then listen to them again, and again, and again, and again, because the repetition helps to carve it into your brain So you’ll remember all that vocabulary, so that grammar structure will start to show up correctly in your own speaking.

So that your pronunciation will really improve while you’re singing and really building those muscles of articulation in your mouth.

The more you listen, the more you’ll start to understand.

Learning English with Music Tip#4:

Alright, and we are down to tip#4.

Can you guess what it might be?

I already kind of mentioned it.

It is, of course, singing!

So, I know a lot of you out there, you’re probably like me that you’re, like, I’m not a great singer.

But, it still is really great to sing because as I’ve said before,

it helps with picking up the pronunciation, picking up the rhythm and flow of the language, because we kind of sing in a way that is exaggerating the way that we naturally speak, especially if you pick some sort of music like, R&B or Rap, or any other thing that kind of is mimicking how we speak.

And when you Sing, actually you want to really exaggerate every single sound because it’s like a gym workout for your mouth, you’re building those muscles of articulation.

As I mentioned before, for your listening, you might even start singing on a slower speed, so you will listen to the song on 0.5x or 0.75x speed, and kind of sing along until you have really learned all of the different lyrics, how to do the same rhythm that the singer is doing, and then you can slowly speed it up, and this is going to be such a great training exercise.

It’s something I have always done with all of my students that enjoy learning with music.

And I have seen them just make humongous progress in doing this every single week.

What’s more, if you play an instrument-I don’t, but, I know a lot of language learners who will combine this for example with their guitar or other instruments and you’re killing two birds with one stone.

Why not learn how to play the guitar while improving your English?

So you might be a bit like me that you don’t really consider yourself a great singer, but I highly recommend that you do it anyway.

I don’t like singing around other people,

so I try to find moments when I’m alone, for example in the shower, even if I’m just home alone doing some different chores, or another really great moment is while cooking.

And I don’t know why, but I especially like listening to French music or Portuguese music while I cook, and singing along while I’m cutting up stuff, boiling stuff, and it’s kind of fun to mix those two things together.

Alright, thanks so much for hanging in there today with me until the end, but before you go I have a present for you-it is a free Memrise lesson which is going to help you to learn a bunch of this vocabulary from Ed Sheeran’s song “Sing”.

I’ll even throw on there some pronunciation for you, so some audio so you can continue to practice that.

And, in the future, maybe I’ll even make a video telling you some of my favourite other tools for learning with music.