Why Songs Make Language Learning WAY Harder Than You Think!

[00:00:00]Many people are told that in order to learn language, you should listen to music in your target language. However, in this video, I'm going to tell you why that's not always the best approach.

[00:00:07]Firstly, you might relate in your native language. You might be listening to a song and you can't understand every single lyric. Maybe because there's a lot of instruments and there's a lot going on. And maybe because they're talking in a way that's quite slurred and it's not completely like the Queen's English, basically. But this is fine because you're not trying to learn your native language, so you don't really care about exactly what the lyrics are.

[00:00:23]However, when it comes to listening to a song in your target language, the words are quite often shortened, it's more colloquial, and it's not really conversational. It's more like, "How are you? Yes, I'm fine." It doesn't flow like a conversation. It's more like It's more like a rhyme, basically. Basically, the way in which people speak in a song is naturally harder to understand than in conversation because people don't pronounce the whole word fully. And also, they'll mix words up so that they actually rhyme rather than what makes sense in real life. So, if you want to get good at having a conversation with a native speaker, you need to understand what's being said to you, what things sound like in conversation. Maybe it's a question, statement, maybe someone's curious, and their emotions. Whereas in a song, quite a lot of that is taken out, and it's quite rapid. while some people might be okay with listening to music to learn a different language, many people, including yourself, might struggle. And the point is, don't beat yourself up if you think you're doing quite well, then you listen to a song in Spanish and you've no idea what anyone's saying. Instead, maybe try and listen to a podcast in your target language.

[00:01:12]You'll still be training your ears to understand the intonation and what people are saying. It's just in a different way to music. And by the way, if you freeze up when you're speaking with native speakers and you'd rather not, you'd rather be more fluent, then I've created a 5-day email course that's free, written by myself, based on 13 years of language learning experience.

[00:01:27]There's a link to it in my profile and also in the comments.