Hopefully you have been developing the habit of keeping an MP3 with you and finding times to let it play throughout your normal day.The post English KISS Episode 4 – Me and my MP3 appeared first on Fair Languages.
Hopefully you have been developing the habit of keeping an MP3 with you and finding times to let it play throughout your normal day. The post English KISS Episode 4– Me and my MP3 appeared first on Fair Languages.
Hopefully you have been developing the habit of keeping an MP3 with you and finding times to let it play throughout your normal day. If so, I hope you were surprised by how much time your ears are available throughout a given day. This is “found time” in your day. Like finding money on the ground we have found opportunities to better our language learning without taking time from our busy schedules.
OK, here we go… You are now going to start playing music (songs with words) by artists in your target language. Let’s say that you wish to learn English. We want to find clearly sung music with lots of lyrics (words). Folk and pop type music will serve us best but anything you like will do fine. Please stay away from styles that tend to use too much slang and street talk (e.g. gangsta rap ) as we need to focus on standard language patterns.
This simple step of converting your listening time to target language listening time will do something remarkable. Much like a musical instrument, you will be tuning your ears to English (or your target language). If you do nothing more than this passive exercise, you will receive remarkable results. One of the biggest problems for foreigners is with the spoken form of a new language. The main reason they have trouble is that they do not know what the words should sound like. There are often many sounds which are not common in your native language, some do not even exist. This simple activity will tune your ability to detect problems without phonetic charts or a speech coach, pretty cool huh?
As you become accustomed to the language’s sounds you will even go further. You will subconsciously begin to detect stress patterns. You will hear small rises in tone or pitch. And while most music is a bit different from conversational patterns, you will also begin to get a feel for the natural rhythm and flow of conversational speech. Later, you can actually focus your listening skills to detect more subtleties but for many of you, this will be a big help without the additional effort.
Before you can learn anything you must know what “good” is. Then it takes a lot of repetitive observations of that “good” example. The wonderful thing about music is that it is generally not boring. I hope you find a few songs that you like enough to play over and over again. The repetition of anything is still the strongest way to learn anything and then it becomes “easy”. And, fortunately when you get tired of any song, simply move on to another album or group of songs you like.
ACTION STEP Whether you are learning a foreign language or wish to stay in practice, choose to fill your day with the beauty of music and song. This habit of listening will not only improve your language learning, it will feed your soul. The beauty of learning a language is not only in getting a job or passing a test. No, it is in tasting of the art and culture that the language delivers. Now, go out there and find some music!
Title Music by: Lasswell | BeeKoo
The post English KISS Episode 4 – Me and my MP3 appeared first on Fair Languages.