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Vital words for understanding
Sing along – To sing together with a song.
Pick up (a language) – To learn something naturally, without studying too much.
Have an ear for music – To be good at recognizing and understanding music.
Imitate – To copy the way someone speaks or acts.
Tactile – Related to the sense of touch.
Distinguish – To recognize the difference between two things.
Decipher – To figure out the meaning of something difficult to understand.
Limbic system – The part of the brain that controls emotions and memory.
Prerequisite – Something that must happen before something else can happen.
Retention – The ability to remember something for a long time.
Struggle a bit – To find something difficult but still try.
Amygdala – The part of the brain linked to emotions.
Hippocampus – A part of the brain that helps with memory and learning.
Absorb – To take in and learn something naturally over time.
I cannot learn English because I am not musical. I don’t have an ear for music.
Oh, how many times do you think I have heard that excuse? And I say excuse on purpose, so you know what this article is about. How music can help with language learning, not that it’s a prerequisite.
Yes, music has a powerful effect on language learning. It affects pronunciation, vocabulary retention and much more. Be honest, how often do you find yourself knowing the words to a song without actually trying to learn them? And it stays with you, you remember it for years.
Music and language have so much in common. They both involve sound processing, rhythm, memory and even emotion. Whenever there is an aspect of emotion, we tend to remember it better. Music also involves more areas of the brain, for example:
- The temporal lobe, where sound is processed. This area of the brain allows you to distinguish between accents, for example. If you hear a person speaking English, you can probably tell where they are from.
- There’s also a temporal lobe that can decipher words and grammar.
- The limbic system and its famous amygdala, which is responsible for our emotions, and the hippocampus.
..and many, many more. Sorry, I did not mean to bore you to death. I am just trying to show how hugely complex languages are. If you think about it – for most of you, English is a weekly thing. If you take all these parts and the parts I am not even mentioning, once a week for 50 minutes. How fast do you think you can progress? If you think about how a child picks up language – for years, even before they start to use it – they absorb it, they listen to it, they have physical and emotional reactions to it; years. It takes years for them. The bottom line? If I ever hear a client complain about not making progress – you should be happy that you can speak the language, that you can be understood.
Music and language are related. There is a BIG BUT: they are separate skills! There are many ways to learn English, and many successful learners never use music at all. It is a fact that your brain processes sound without any musical ability, and you do not need to sing or have a good ear for music to understand language. Remember that even deaf children can learn to speak. Our brains are naturally wired to recognise patterns in speech.
I touched on an interesting subject: deaf children can learn to speak. Yes, with guidance, training, speech therapy, sign language, lip reading, tactile methods – all help. Speech is possible without hearing, simply because the brain is flexible. It adapts to what we see, what we touch.
Music helps a lot, I won’t lie. It’s a bit harder for people who don’t have an ear for music, yes, and they might struggle a bit more and maybe never get as fluent as they’d like, but it’s possible.
Here are some tips on how to incorporate music into your learning:
- Play English songs in the background, your brain will pick them up.
- Listen actively: focus on the lyrics, identify words, try to understand.
- Use lyrics with missing words (LingoClip)
- Sing along to imitate the pronunciation and rhythm.
- Repeat exactly what you hear.
- Associate songs with themes – love songs for emotional vocabulary, folk songs for storytelling. (Galway Girl)
- Use karaoketexty to check, compare and perhaps correct the translation.
Don’t give up. Get all the help you can.