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Languages and Music | ||
 Language Learning Forum : Music, Movies, TV & Radio |  | |
| jdmoncada Tetraglot Senior Member United States Joined 5025 days ago 470 posts - 741 votes  Speaks: English*, German, Spanish, Finnish Studies: Russian, Japanese | Message 9 of 16 15 February 2011 at 2:51am | IP Logged | |||||
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I did my bachelor's degree final project on the use of language pedagogies to teach music. My degree was in music education.
I fully believe in the way music and languages are learned similarly. For one, the diligent and regular practice does wonders. But also, there is the sound analysis that musicians take more care to do. We can better match pitch and rhythm than others. For example, in Finnish, the words are accented on the first beat and are often triplet sounding in nature. So I have done rhythm drills to get the pattern of the language down. Otherwise, it would sound completely stupid to the Finnish ear. English, on the other hand, sounds like it has a lot of pick-up notes. It's rather amusing that way. I am a multi-instrumentalist/singer when I do music, just as I am multi-lingual (dare I consider myself a polyglot?) with languages. I follow the notion of not being satisfied with doing only one thing and that all knowledge informs the other. Plus, we don't have to start from scratch with every new thing. I'll give an an example from recent learning: In Japanese, the word for "how much" is (in Romaji): ikura. That word reminded me of "ikkuna," which is the Finnish word for "window". As I thought of it some more, I told myself I could remember it by thinking of "how much" the item in the "window" would cost. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| schoenewaelder Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 5551 days ago 759 posts - 1197 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: German, Spanish, Dutch | Message 10 of 16 15 February 2011 at 11:44am | IP Logged | |||||
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I'm tone deaf. I find it very hard to hear and understand foreign languages and develop an understandable accent.
edit: in fact not only am I tone deaf, but I am rhythm deaf and lyric deaf. It amazes me when people suggest using music to learn languages, because I can't even understand the words in my native language. And I know lots of people say they can't understand the lyrics, but they usually mean they misunderstood one or two words, probably producing some amusing effect. For a typical pop song, I will probably be able to understand a couple of lines from the chorus, but the rest is generally just howling and wailing.(edit: that sounds a bit derogatory. I actually like pop/rock, I just can't understand the words) Edited by schoenewaelder on 16 February 2011 at 4:03pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| William Maxwell Newbie France Joined 5024 days ago 1 posts - 2 votes Speaks: English* | Message 12 of 16 15 February 2011 at 2:41pm | IP Logged | |||||
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All these posts talk about brain function etc. The actual use of musical skills or abilities to learn languages seems far more interesting. I doubt that linguistic ability helps musicians much, but I am certain that musical characteristics - rhythm, pitch, melody etc. - can be used when learnign a laguage.
Simple example: when learning Latin at school we were taught a silly rhyme to remember the many Latin prepositions and that require the ablative case. "A, ab, absque, coram, de Palam, clam, cum, ex and e, Sine, tenus, prae and pro Take the ablative, you know" This doggerel verse uses simple rhythm and rhyme to make it easy to remember, and as a mnemonic it is very helpful (there are other versions, too). Moving along, acquiring vocabulary is easier if you can sing a series of words or phrases to an easy tune. Almost any song will do, although rapsta and repetitive pop refrains are not necessarily as much help as more old-fashioned stuff where there is a clear story-line. Finally, it has been known for years that chanting - the whole class in a line, you start at one end and go on to the other for the declension of verbs etc. - is a great help, like wise choral repetition of words to be memorized. In Islamic religious schools much use is made of this technique, with the addition of rocking movements - a whole class reciting the words of the Koran, in time, rhythmically. Even if they don't understand the language (Arabic in 700 AD was not the same as Arabic of 2010 AD (sorry, I don't have the AH dates to hand). But the kids remember the words, the original meaning may be learned later... Rather like Brits learning Anglo-Saxon, in fact, although I don't know anyone who uses this technique in AS classes. Anyway, I'm currently studying Hungarian, and I shall be trying to make use of the singalong approach to this complex and delightful language. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| polyglHot Pentaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 5057 days ago 173 posts - 229 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English, German, Spanish, Indonesian Studies: Russian | Message 13 of 16 15 February 2011 at 3:19pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Yes of course one learns by singing simple songs in the beginning.
However one does not need any special skill in music to be good at languages, nor does this mean one is better at languages. I can sing I guess, but I don't play any music. Had I had training from a young age it is possible that I could have excelled at this too. As oposed to mathematics. I don't know. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| jdmoncada Tetraglot Senior Member United States Joined 5025 days ago 470 posts - 741 votes Speaks: English*, German, Spanish, Finnish Studies: Russian, Japanese | Message 15 of 16 16 February 2011 at 10:34pm | IP Logged | |||||
Thank you for asking! It was written in 1998, and I am nto sure I could still open the document if I wanted. I will have to find out the answer. Again, thank you. :) 1 person has voted this message useful |
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