Learning a New Language with Music

​Did you spend any time in school learning a foreign language? I did. I sat in a high school classroom for three years for five hours a week studying French, but I am sad to say, not much of it stuck. (Well, a little did - at least enough to carry on small conversations while I was visiting Libreville, Gabon in Africa with my uncle when I was nineteen years old. I was glad for that. ) 

​In college, I studied Japanese in preparation for a six month stint as an English teacher at a Sekio Gakuin High School in Japan, and later I took a Spanish class.

Recently, we had Popular 8 Note Songs translated into Spanish, German and French so that native speakers of those languages can have an easily accessible start with music, and so that English speakers can use the books to help them with their language development through music and singing.

​Music and Language Connection

Music makes words memorable. Some of the foreign language words I remember the best are ones I learned to simple children songs. It was thought at one time that we use different parts of the brain for music and for language, but we now know there is a lot of overlap. Music can improve one’s language learning ability, and vice versa. Mozart was not only a​gifted musician, but also spoke several language including French, German and Italian.

You can use songs to help you learn foreign phrases by counting the number of syllables in the sentence you want to learn, finding a nursey rhyme with the same number of syllables and swapping the words to the nursery rhyme out for your foreign language sentence. It may feel awkward at first, but keep on singing. It will get easier.

Which Language Should I Learn?

​Spanish: With over 400 million speakers, Spanish is the fourth most commonly spoken language in the world. It is the mother tongue in twenty-one countries and the official language on four continents. Spanish is a romance language like Italian and French, and a previous knowledge of Spanish can be an advantage when studying other languages. It is easy to pronounce Spanish words because the language is almost phonetically perfect which makes Spanish one of the easiest languages to learn. ​​

​German: There are more native speakers of German in the European Union than any other language. Regarding business, Germany is the world’s second-largest exporter, and its economy ranks number one in Europe and number 4 worldwide. German is spelled phonetically, and once you understand the patterns, it is easy to predict how the written word will be pronounced. Both English and German evolved from the ancestor language Germanic, and two languages share many similarities in both grammar and vocabulary.

French: French and English are the only two languages spoken on all five continents, and French is one of the official languages of the United Nations. After English and German, French is the third most widely used language on the internet. The majority of native French speakers are not in France; they are in Africa. French is a melodious language which is often referred to as the language of love. As a romantic language, it is closely related to Spanish, Italian, Portuguese and Romanian. Nearly half of all English words are derived from French.

A Whole New World
Exposure to other languages gives one a new window on the world. Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once said, “the limits of my language are the limits of my universe.”

Popular 8 Note Songs in Spanish, German and French can help you stretch those limits a little bit more.

NOTE: Popular 8 Note Songs in Spanish and German are now available! French is coming soon!