Learn English Through Song

(This post is from guest blog­ger Angelita Williams)

Textbooks–they’re my own per­sonal form of Ambien.   I’ve never been able to fig­ure it out, no mat­ter what it is, one page and I’m out like a light. But let me play with my Ipod and the music car­ries me for days.  I boast about being able to learn an entire new song in just a few hours.

You might not think of it as study­ing but in a sense that’s exactly what you are doing. You lis­ten and repeat, lis­ten and repeat, until the lyrics are per­ma­nently implanted in your head. And unlike mate­r­ial gained through books, songs can radi­ate through your head for days or even weeks before they’re entirely flushed down the drain.

So, what bet­ter way to study Eng­lish than learn­ing it through song? You get to learn vocab­u­lary while hear­ing its proper pro­nun­ci­a­tion, though you might want to stay away from rap or any­thing too mod­ern just for now, since col­lo­qui­alisms are best learned at a more advanced stage, when you can tell the dif­fer­ence between cor­rect and incor­rect idiom usage. Below are some quick tips on how to study your lyrics:

1. Pick a song that you like but that is not too com­plex. It’s extremely impor­tant that you get the cor­rect lyrics so that you can deci­pher the right mean­ing of the song. Lyrics mode is a great site to get accu­rate lyrics.

2. Read the lyrics in their entirety. You don’t need to under­stand every­thing but try to see if you can at least get a good feel of what the song is about. Is it a roman­tic song? A sad song? A happy song? Is it abstract or lit­eral? Try to com­pare and con­trast the Eng­lish song to some­thing famil­iar in your native tongue. It’ll help you see sim­i­lar and cul­tural dif­fer­ences from your own.

3. Re-read and cir­cle all the words/phrases you don’t know and would like to learn. Some­times con­text clues will give you a bet­ter under­stand­ing of what the word means but if nec­es­sary, by all means look up their exact mean­ing in a dic­tio­nary. A dic­tio­nary might also be use­ful in find­ing other inter­est­ing phrases or words.

4. Hear the song three to four times before you decide to chime in karaoke style. Read the lyrics a few times right before bed and also try lis­ten­ing to the song while you sleep. Even in your slum­ber, your brain will still retain the infor­ma­tion. Lis­ten and repeat until you got it down.

5. Test your­self. There’s a neat Web site called Lyrics Train­ing that is espe­cially designed to help non-English speak­ers learn the lan­guage. As a series of song lyrics run down the screen its up to you to fill in the miss­ing words. You can choose from a huge selec­tion of con­tem­po­rary songs in their bank that are divided into easy, medium and hard dif­fi­culty levels.

By-line:

This guest post is con­tributed by Angelita Williams, who writes on the top­ics of online col­lege courses.  She wel­comes your com­ments at her email Id: angelita.williams7 @gmail.com.