Language Learning & Music

Endangered species. Endangered whales. Endangered languages? What's an endangered language? About half of the world's 6000 languages will be extinct in 100 years unless we act to preserve them. In this video, I explain why you should...

USA Today and Higher Ed report in the article, Colleges strive to make foreign languages relevant, that one college is finally getting it right and making foreign language education be more than just grammar and...

Do you want to know what the Brazilian Portuguese words "nossa", "balada", "pegar", and "galera" mean? Do you want to distinguish the words "mas" and "mais" and not confuse them? You can learn those lessons in...

Fortunately, a scant few of us will ever be in a life or death situation requiring foreign language knowledge. However, Canetti’s example is not the only example of how a multilingual person in the Balkans used a language to save a life. I’m co-producing the documentary, Saved by Language, with Bryan Kirschen about how Moris Albahari saved his life in the Holocaust by speaking in Ladino (Judeo-Spanish) to an Italian Colonel and a US pilot.

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!

Aaron Myers and I met in Istanbul, Turkey in November 2011. Aaron Meyers has created his project, I-586, to bring free language learning materials to people in languages other than English since so many...

About a week ago, I received an email from the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages asking the members if they felt that the ads for the Rosetta Stone foreign language learning...

Why is the UK losing 11 to 26 billion dollars a year? Nick Chambers explains that there aren't enough foreign language speakers to service export markets. Susanna Zaraysky answers why English speakers are not good...

The French, who are very proud of and particular about the pronunciation and proper use of their language, have a saying about people who speak French poorly and/or with a bad accent: “parler français...

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...