Music and Language

Nathaniel Worthman
Professor. Dadak
10.4.19
Music and Language
For my final language log I want to talk about how music has affected my language learning process. For my whole life, music and language have been important to the development of who I am asa person today but almost exclusively separate. It wasn’t until 6th  grade when I decided to dedicate my summer to perfecting my knowledge of the Spanish language that I mixed the two. At the end of my 6th grade school year, I asked Señora Perez for her advice. “How can I accelerate the language learning process and become fluent this summer.” Looking back now I can laugh and can understand why sra. Perez was so taken aback. She had told me that in order to get better at Spanish over the summer I could do a couple of things: watch tv in Spanish, read an article everyday in Spanish and finally, listen to spanish music. While I did all of the things she recommended, I focused on listening to Spanish music. To me, this was the most exciting of all the options.
By the end of the summer I was singing at the top of my lungs en Español and I had actually learned a heck of a lot of vocab and subconsciously some grammar concepts. Because of this, I was able to talk to my friends and neighbors more confidently in spanish and thus I knew this was a great way to learn languages. Ever since then, I have listened to music in languages from every continent but Antartica! From my short period of time where I only listened to let it go in the 41 languages it was offered to today where while writing this i’m listening to music in French, Russian, Latvian, Korean and Portuguese and that's only the last 5 songs!
The reason I decided to write about this topic is because I was reading through this language “blog” Ilove called Babbel and came across an article called “Face The Music — How Singing Can Help You Learn A Language” by Dylan Lyons where he talks about how listening to music in the target language can really help to make new words, phrases and concepts stick with you! So get some headphones and get listening!
https://www.babbel.com/en/magazine/how-singing-can-help-you-learn-a-language

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