Language Learning & Music

In this lesson, Luciana Lage (of Street Smart Brazil) and I use the song Toda Sexta Feira to teach the days of the week in Portuguese, how to use the words todo/toda, and pronounce...

I interviewed (Don Blanquito) and Idahosa Ness about how they, as native English speakers, create rap, funk and hip hop music in Spanish and Portuguese. They also discuss how music helps people get into the...

Learning languages with music, preserving the Ladino languages with songs, CALA CNN, February 10, 2012 On Friday February 10, 2012, the CALA show on CNN interviewed Montserrat Franco and I in Spanish about how to...

Listen to this new Subtitle podcast episode "Is a polyglot's brain different?",  to find out the answer. You'll also learn about my language-learning story and about the brains of people who speak many languages. I did...

I just published La lingua è musica, the ebook version of my book on learning languages using music, TV, radio, etc, in Italian. Free during Covid-19 pandemic I am offering the book for free during the...

Language and Music. Language is Music. Music helps you learn language. It's so simple. Yet sometimes it feels like I am talking to the wall when I tell people how lyrical songs can help people...

Last week, for International Women’s Day, I wrote a blog post, How we all benefit when women are multilingual about the scarcity of female language bloggers and You Tube polyglots on the Fluent in...

  One missing digit    One missing digit (not a finger!) almost kept me from going to India. En route to Chennai (Madras), I had a rude awakening at the Frankfurt airport: my passport number in my...

Just because somebody speaks two languages, he/she is not a natural, automatic interpreter and translator. A multilingual person can’t translate anything anybody wants, and can’t do simultaneous interpretation. I have received many requests and demands to translate and interpret on the spot from monolingual people and from multilinguals who aren’t used to being in situations where they have to interpret or translate. The idea that just because somebody is bilingual that they should make a career as a translator and an interpreter or do it for friends and family as favors is absolutely faulty.

I just got Aniruddh Patel's book, Music, Language, and the Brain because I am keenly interested in learning more about the relationship between music, language and our complex neurological system. Patel is a neuroscientist and musician who...