Language Learning & Music

We've probably heard of people improving their conversation skills in a language over a meal. I'm reversing the trend. Portuguese vocabulary goes up and the inches melt away. (Let me be ambitious and count in...

At the risk of sounding like I am crazy, I hear multilingual voices in my head. To learn native pronunciation, I first hear a native speaking in my head.   When we see things in our heads,...

Another TV interview about the awesome power of music! Songs, TV and other media help us learn foreign languages. Hip-hop music can keep at-risk kids in school and out of trouble. Susanna Zaraysky and Anthony Pineda...

(Photo is of Lisbon, Portugal.) Feeling like I am in Portugal without leaving the United States I ventured into the Little Portugal area of San Jose, California, where the local immigrant population from the Azores islands...

Here’s a great show in Portuguese about the healing effects of music. Musicoterapia e a energia que vem dos sons (Music therapy and the energy that comes from sounds) from Caminhos Alternativos from the Brazilian...

Do polyglots just talk about language learning? If we did, we'd probably bore each other very quickly! I had the pleasure of meeting Richard Simcott and Luca Lampariello in Poznań, Poland earlier this month. We share...

However, when we are learning our second language, we rely more on declarative memory to learn grammar rules and structure rather than only by procedural memory. (In my words, we are like parrots than copy when we hear native speakers say.) This doesn’t mean that we can learn a language well without learning grammar and structure, but it shows that listening and repeating serve a real purpose in how we can learn the syntax and structure of a language. Listening to and repeating song lyrics CAN help us learn grammar!

f you fashion yourself Ernest Hemingway or Jorge Luis Borges’ incarnate and therefore exempt from learning an “inferior” tongue, let’s do a reality check. Where’s your Nobel Prize for Literature? Where are the bookshelves of tomes in your name worthy of mention?

                        While on the set for the Comunidad del Valle show at NBC in San Jose, California, I gave a short interview about Language is Music and how to use music and media to learn...

An Introduction to Korean Indie Music for Korean Language Learners Guest post by Sam Gendreau It’s been 5 years since I started looking for some of the best possible—preferably noncommercial—Korean bands out there, and today is...