Language Learning & Music

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...

As I’ve written before, I wouldn’t have realized that there's a link between learning languages and music if it weren’t for Dr. Oliver Sacks. Dr. Sacks’ books,(Musicophilia, The Mind’s Eye, etc.) have shown me and...

David Mansaray and Claude Cartaginese are doing a The Polyglot Project Podcast with interviews of language learners. It was an honor to talk to them about how I learned languages. I clarified how I...

This is a thank you note that I received from a university student who invited me to give a presentation on language learning using music and the media at Illinois College in October 2016....

I agree with Michael Hofmann, author, poet and translator who wrote in the British newspaper, The Guardian, about the importance of foreign language education. I am glad the US is not following the UK...

The Telegraph article, Foreign languages are 'elitist' subjects, came out earlier this year in the UK showing that state jobs require foreign language knowledge while fewer school offer language classes. This means that more people...

The strange thing with the Portuguese language is I don't remember why I wanted to learn it, yet I can speak it. The Spanish language and Italian literature and film have been major influences in my learning the Portuguese language and becoming interested in Portugal.

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.

The problem facing anyone going from Spanish to Portuguese is to mistake similar words or sentence structures to be the same. They are not. I am speaking from experience. I also have to catch...

So you're not from a bilingual family and you live in a monolingual area where there's no one who speaks the language you're learning, you can still learn a new language. Aaron Myers and I...