Transcripts
1. Introduction: Hi there and welcome
to my class on jump starting your language learning
journey through music. My name is Danny. I'm a polyglot and lover
of language learning. Since the age of eight, I have years of experience
learning how to use language learning resources to progress my language
learning development. This class will give you the
mental and practical tools to turn something that
everyone loves doing, listening to music into a powerful medium for
understanding the sounds and structure of your
target language and for charting your own path for your continued
language learning. After this class is done. This class is mainly
for beginners. There's just one
logistical condition. Students must be familiar with the script of
their target language and have an idea of the
sounds most letters make. E.g. if you already speak a language that uses
the Latin script than another language that uses the Latin script would be
appropriate for this class. But if you want to learn a language that uses
the Cyrillic script, you need to be familiar
with the sounds, most of the letters and the
Cyrillic alphabet make. If you're not yet familiar with the scripts or the sounds
that most letters make. Take some time to do so and then come on
back to the class. No, you don't actually need
to know how to read yet. You just need to have an idea of the sounds most letters make, while beginners will get
most out of the class, intermediate and
advanced learners are certainly more than
welcome a heads up. This class is based on the
philosophy that learning a language and getting good at a language takes a lot of time. Therefore, this class
is not for anyone looking for a get fluent
quick methodologies. Throughout this class,
you'll be listening to lots and lots of music and have lots of practice applying the active listening
techniques that I'll be teaching you
throughout the course. By the end of the class, you'll have a language
tool that you can use for you for the rest of your life and apply to any new language you choose
to learn in the future. Here's how the class will
work and the first lesson, I'll be showing you how
to find music from there. Each subsequent
lesson, we'll focus on one aspect of language to which will apply active
listening techniques. Additionally, I will
talk about how to use a few additional online
resources to supplement and support your active
listening throughout, I'll be using examples from my own language
learning journey. I hope you enjoyed the class. I'll see you in the
next lesson where we'll talk about
the class project.
2. Class Project: At the end of most lessons, you'll have a small tasks to complete to reinforce
what we've learned. These small tasks will come together to create
your final project, which will take the
form of a chart that summarizes everything
you've learned about your target language
over the course of the class and topics you'd like to explore further as you continue on your language
learning journey. Let's look at an example of
what this might look like. So I built my chart out
and Microsoft Word, but you can build
it out and whatever works best for you,
whether that's squared. So notes, et cetera, you can see that
the structure of this chart is fairly simple. There are three categories here, letters and sounds, vocabulary and topics to explore further. You may want to
start with these. And over the course
of the class, you may find that you would want to add a few more categories. So this is just the start, but you can personalize
it how you like. You can style your chart however you think
works best for you. Just know that for the
purpose of this class, the content of the chart is much more important
than the way it looks. I suggest you go
ahead and build out a simple structure,
something like this, so that you have
something to fill out in the upcoming lessons to create a successful
final project. Think of this less as a project to be completed at the
end of this course, and more as a guide
that you can build out slowly over the
course of this class, creating this chart as
a way to organize what you've learned
about your language over the course of this class. It will also allow you to look back on your journey
to see how far you've come and give you direction as you keep moving
forward in your learning. You can refer to my chart filled with examples and each of the columns in the project and resources tab of this class. To get an idea of the type of content we will be filling
out our charts with. Now, let's get started
on our music journey.
3. Setting Your Foundation: Since music is our medium
for learning in this course, It's important that we
find songs that we both like and are suitable
for our level. Feel free to use
any platform you like or have access
to, to find music. My preferences spotify,
but YouTube is also a great option if you know
what kind of music you like, I suggest typing in the name of the language or country where
that language is spoken, plus the genre of
music you like to enter the search bar of
the platform you're using. If you don't
necessarily gravitate towards a particular
genre of music, you can type something
like language, name or country plus topside. Now, just click around until you find a song
that you vibe with. Nope, I strongly
recommend that you choose a song that's slower
as opposed to faster. Remember, your ears are
still new to the language. This step of choosing a song, while simple, might
take a bit of time. You really want to make sure you find a song that you like, because you're gonna be
listening to it a lot. And a song that isn't too fast. Here's a song that I like and I think is a suitable
speed for beginners. It's a song in
Brazilian Portuguese, and it's a song that I'll keep referring back to over
the course of this. Gko goes to notice that there is a moderate pace
and the words are also set at a moderate speed, which allows me to
hear them clearly. That's what you
want to look for. The next step is to listen
to your song enough times. But what is enough times? Well, have you ever gotten
a song stuck in your head? It's kind of like that. Enough is when you
can hum the song, even when you're not
listening to it. And you can sing a
few words here and there with or
without live music. Now, I know it
might sound silly, but you have to listen to
your songs so many times. But remember, you're a beginner in the language and you have a large auditory
learning curve to overcome by listening to
your song over and over, you're taking the first
crucial steps to developing an ear for your language without you even
being aware of it, your brain is starting
to internalize the flow, the sounds and the
intonation of the language. That's the end of this lesson. I leave you with two tasks. First, find a song that you like and is a suitable speed
and drop the name, the artist and the language
and the discussion tab. Second, listened to
your song enough, I'll see you in the next lesson.
4. Noting Surprises in Pronunciation: So by this point, you've become really acquainted
with your song. Now, we're gonna go
online and find lyrics to the song so we can follow along with the music to find lyrics. I just like to go
onto Google and type in the name of the song lyrics. You could also use YouTube and find a lyrical
version of the song. But I prefer Google. And here's why. We're going to want the
lyrics and a Word document so we can work with them and take notes and annotate them. So here I'm just
copying the lyrics, pasting them into Word, adding some space in
between each line, changing the font to a font. I like making the
font bigger and changing the lyrics to
my target language, which is Brazilian Portuguese. So now that I found my lyrics and put them in a Word document, I'm ready to listen
and follow along. At this stage, we really want
to focus on pronunciation. What does that mean
as we're listening to the song and following
along with the lyrics, we want to pay
attention to the sounds certain letters or letter
combinations make. As you listen and follow
along to the lyrics, you will start to notice
that certain letters and letter combinations sound
different than you expected. What's happening
is you're reading the lyrics and you're listening to the music
at the same time. But you're reading is based off of the languages
you already know. Or if you're learning a
language with a new script, what you're doing here is
reinforcing the connection between what you're hearing and the letters you're seeing. Let's take a look at
an example together. So paying attention
to pronunciation, there's one thing
that stands out to me about these two lines, and that's the letter R. And the languages that I
know how to speak already, the R is pronounced as a row. But what I'm hearing here is when the R is at the
beginning of the word, that sounds like an English, h. Let's listen to these
two lines again. The R here makes a sound. Likewise, Our here
also makes a sound. So now that I've
made a discovery, I'm going to start
annotating my lyrics. So I'm going to
highlight this word. And I'm going to go to Insert, Comment and write a little note about the discovery
I've made are at beginning of word
equals English, h sound. Now, there's
something important. You need to be aware of. Letters and letter combinations don't always make
the same sound. So what that means is, once you've made
a discovery about a certain letter or letter
combination and how it sounds, I would try to find that letter or letter combination again somewhere else and that song and see if it makes
the same sound. Usually there are two
things that dictate how a letter or letter
combinations sounds. The first is the
placement in a word, whether it's at the beginning,
middle, or the end. And the second is
what other letters are around that letter
or letter combination. So keep these two things in
mind as you start to listen, make discoveries, and know
what you're learning. So if we go back to our example, we discovered that are at
the beginning of a word, it makes a sound. And we verified that discovery with the example in
the second line here. But what about art and other
positions of the word? So we have this word
here where there's an art in the middle and
then are at the end. Then we also have an
r in the middle here, and an R at the end here. So I'm going to play
these two lines again. And we're going to listen
to see what sounded the alarm makes in each
of these positions. And this word, both
Rs make a sound. Now let's see if the
same thing is true. In this second line. Gkl goes to, okay, so in this word it's also a. But here the art
was almost silent. It was vague. Not vid. I see consistency with the R in the middle of the word
being pronounced as. I'm going to note
that in a comment are in middle of word equals. I'm going to write Spanish are, which makes sense to me
since I speak Spanish. Now for the r at the end, again, we have one instance where
it's pronounced as butter, and another instance where
it's not pronounced, it's silent or seemingly silent. So I'm going to make
notes of those as well. So let me highlight this. Are. Are at end of word
equals Spanish are. But here are at end
of word equals. I'm going to write silent. Now at this point,
I don't know why the Rs at the end of the word
are pronounced differently, but we're going to
keep that in mind. Keep repeating this process
of listening to your song and noting anything surprising
about their pronunciation, feel free to pause and rewind
as much as you need to. So far in the
examples I've given, I've focused on the
letter R because it makes a very different sound
than what I'm used to. But other good things
to pay attention to our anytime you see
vowel combinations. Anytime you see any letter with an accent mark
above or below it. Once you feel like you've
gotten a grasp and all the surprises of
pronunciation and your song. We're going to
repeat this process, but this time with a new song. So just like the
previous lesson, we're going to spend
some time looking for a song that we like and
is a suitable speed, then we're going
to listen to it a lot and we're going to
look up the lyrics. Then we're going to follow
the steps of this lesson. We're going to listen
to them music, follow along with the lyrics. And no any surprises
and pronunciation. You should find that this
time around less than milk. If you still have doubts about some aspects of pronunciation, even after listening to several songs and following
along with the lyrics. That's completely fine. I mentioned in the project video that the final
project is less of a final project and more of a guide that we'd be building out over the course
of this class. Start to note in the
chart any new discoveries or anything surprising you
find about your language. This is how you start giving direction to your language
learning journey. After this course is done, I encourage you to be
proactive about building out that column in your chart labeled things to
explore further. Examples of this
can be accent marks or letters having more
than one pronunciation. And you being unsure want to pronounce it one
way versus another. So to recap, the main purpose of this lesson is to focus
on sound and identify letters and letter
combinations that make sounds that are different than how you would
expect them to. The more you repeat the process
laid out in this lesson, the better you will get. Keep repeating this process until you're able to
listen to a new song. And there are zero to
little new surprises about pronunciation. Now, to step back a little bit, think about the big picture and reinforce why we're
doing what we're doing. You might be wondering, why do I even have to do this? Can I just look up
some YouTube video and see how each letter or letter
combination is pronounced. The answer is yes,
you absolutely could. But there are two
important reasons for taking the approach I'm
laying out in this class. Number one, the more you make these discoveries
on your own, the more they will
stick with you. Number two, learning through music allows you to
see these letters and letter combinations
pronounced it in context and not in isolation. This is important because the way letters sound
isolated do not always correspond with the way
they're pronounced in the middle of words are
surrounded by other letters. That's it for this lesson, your task is to note five
discoveries you've made about your target languages
pronunciation in the discussion tab, see you in the next lesson.
5. Putting Writing to Sound: By this point, you should have
a solid idea of the sounds each letter or
letter combination makes in different
positions within a word. If you don't feel
like you do yet, I suggest going back to the previous lessons and
repeating the process. Now, what we're going
to do in this lesson is really going to
take your listening abilities to another level. We're going to try
and write down what we hear as we're
listening to a song. All the listening
you've done up until this point has prepared
you well for this, using the same songs we've listened to you up
until this point, we're going to choose
one of those songs. And within that song, we're going to choose one verse
that we want to focus on. We're going to listen
to that verse. And without looking
at the lyrics, tried to write down all
the words that we hear. So I'm going to use the
same song I've been using for the examples
throughout this course, I pulled up a new empty
Word document here, where I'm going to write
down the lyrics that I hear. I'm going to play a one
line from the song closet. Type what I hear, then
play the next line of this long pause and
type what I hear again. So here's the first line. Is Viking. Now I'm going to
transcribe what I heard. If you need to rewind and replay the line to fully transcribe it, that is completely fine. Now I'm going to play
the second line. That was the second line. So again, I'm going to try
and write down what I heard. Once you've given a shot at writing down the
words to that verse, pull up the lyrics and compare them to what
you've written. So I've pulled up the
Word document with the actual lyrics
to the song and put it side-by-side with
my transcription of the two lines
that we just heard. Then note the places where you've either
completely misheard the word and wrote another
word or misspelled a word. Now I'm just
changing the font in the document with my
transcription to make it bigger and match the
font and the size of the lyrics and the other word document to
make it easier to compare. Now, I'm going to start
highlighting any discrepancies between my transcription and that the actual
lyrics to the song. Now pull up the music and play
that section of the song. Pay attention to the spots
where you messed up. So let's take a look at
these two lines together so I can share a little
bit of my thought process. So now that I've
identified and highlighted all the discrepancies
between my transcription. If the lyrics, I'm
going to replay each of these lines
and really focus on what went wrong between
what I heard and what's actually being said. Vikings. Okay, so in this first line, I have this word highlighted and the lyrics that's spelled
M A S. I wrote it. And if you noticed, when I played the song, it was pronounced more
like mice and not mass, as I would have expected as someone who
speaks Spanish, e.g. so I'm going to use
the comments just like we did in the last
lesson to write a little note to myself that AS and a
word makes AIS sound. And I'm a little bit
unsure about this. Now at this point, I
don't know if this is true for anytime I see a
S at the end of a word, but I'm just going to
jot down a little note. And this is a good
example of something to add to the column of your
final project chart, labeled things to
explore further. Moving on, this word here has a soft see when
I played the song. So it looks like
when I wrote it, I forgot a little
accent on the sea, and I'm assuming that
makes the C soft. So let me just
insert another note. So c equals soft. See, again, I'm
not 100% sure yet, but these are things I
can explore further. Now, I noticed that here I wrote a letter Y instead
of the letter e, even though it's
pronounced e and the song. And this is a good example of a language that I
know how to speak. Spanish, influencing how I read, how I understand my
new target language. So in Spanish, that e
sound is written with a y. I just need to be aware
of that moving forward. Now here, I actually forgot
this word completely and that's because I didn't
really hear it in the song. And so to me it sounded
like the word before it and the word after it
just kinda float together. So that's an indication
that my ears still need some training to pick
up on some words. This is really going to
strengthen your ability to listen to a string of
words and write them down. But it's not so important that you get your spelling
right at the beginning. What's important is the
process. Keep repeating. This process for the same
births are a couple of lines until you're able to write down all of the words correctly. Then either move on to
another section within the same song or choose a different section
of a different song. It's really up to you,
just a fair warning. This might be quite
challenging at the beginning. You may only get a
few words correct, or maybe even none at all, just like the previous lesson, the more you repeat
this process, the better you will
get as you go to this process if you find
it difficult and find yourself wondering why despite
having a good grasp on all of the sounds that letters and letter combinations make
from their previous lessons. It's because of now, instead of just
having to recognize a sound within a
pre-written text, you're having to actively create text from
what you're hearing. From my own experience
learning languages, I have found that this approach really boosts my comprehension. It's a skill that
I use even when I get into advanced
levels of language. And so I almost see this step as not really having an end. This is perhaps the
most important step of this entire methodology. Don't be afraid to spend
a lot of time doing this. Keep repeating this process
as much as you can. Also as you go
through this process, I again encourage
you to fill out that final project chart with any new discoveries
that you make. That's it for this lesson, we're going to learn
how to pair this with what we're going to talk
about in the next lesson, which is giving meaning
to your target language. There's no task for this lesson, nothing to drop down
in the discussion tab. Just listen to your music and
write down what you hear. See you in the next lesson.
6. Adding Meaning to Music: Congrats on making it this far, you have stuck through
a challenging process that has required time and dedication and probably
several bouts of frustration. You are now really
well-positioned to start adding meaning to
your target language. Music is a diverse Treasury, as we've seen so far, there are a lot of
things we can glean from listening to music
and reading lyrics. One of those things
is vocabulary. Now what we're covering
in this lesson as not so much a step to
be performed in isolation, but rather in conjunction with we've talked about
in the previous lesson. As you go through the process of listening to music and
writing down what you hear more and more to perfect your spelling and
your comprehension, you'll start to
find that there are certain words that will
stick out to you because they are repeated
either many times in one song or across
various songs. These are words that are
really important to pay attention to because
more than likely, since they're
showing up so much, they are part of a language
is core vocabulary. So this is a good starting point for adding meaning to
your target language. Let's discuss how we can use free online resources to
help you in this process. So far, when we've been
working with lyrics, we've been using them in the target language,
a translated version. But in this step, we're going to use the
translated version to help us derive some
meaning from what we're listening to Google lyrics has a feature that automatically translates the lyrics into the language your
computer is set in. This is an excellent tool to use to start
learning vocabulary. To access this feature, I'm just going to search
my song lyrics and Google and then scroll
down to the bottom of the lyrics until I see this button that says
translate to English. Once I click on it, a line-by-line
translation will appear. So the first thing
I'm gonna do here is pay attention to
any repeated words. So in my target language, if I look at the
first few lines, I can pick out some
words that repeat. Since the structure
of sentences isn't always the same
between languages, it may be a little bit
difficult to point out the exact translated word for the word that
you see repeated. So what I would do is find the several instances where you see this word in your
target language. And then look at the translations
for each of these lines and see what word is repeated
within the translations. More than likely, that'll tell you the meaning
of the word. The first word I found was this. And the translation
of this line says, I know it's just
across the street. I'm gonna go find
the other instance of that I highlighted
right here. And read the translation of the line to see
whose face it is. The thing in common between
these two lines is, it is or it's, I'm going to keep that in mind. Now I'm gonna go to
the next word that I had found, which was osha. So here I see the translation of the line is today I
didn't wake up willing, and I'm going to go find
another instance of origin. This line says Today
it's too late to cross. Okay, So I see today and today that looks
like it could be it. Let me go to the last
example I had found or as you today, I don't know. Okay. So I'm pretty sure
that boys humans today. Okay, so as I've stressed several times
throughout this class, It's a good idea to fill out your project chart
as you go along. So I have my final project
chart pulled up here, and I'm going to
start filling out the vocabulary column with the words that I've identified. So we have n equals it is, and we have 0 equals today. Now, a really
important note here, the Google Translate feature
is not always accurate. E.g. if I read the first four
lines of the translation, I know it's just across the street to see
whose face it is. But go on the way. I tripped and break a bone. It sounds kinda awkward. The idea is to use the Google feature
as a starting point. Then we're going to verify the translation with
another source. We're going to use a website
called word reference.com. Word reference is a great
tool because it has over 15 different
languages dictionaries. And it gives you translations and example sentences
allowing you to see the different contexts that are word it can be used in and seeing how the
meaning changes within these different contexts. If the word reference
translation matches the Google translation, you can be sure that that's
what the word means. But let's say that's
actually not the case. And the word reference translation
is actually different. The Google translation
in this case, I would go with the word
reference translation as it's a more accurate source. But I would still use the Google feature to establish
context to make sure that the translation I'm picking
out from word reference makes sense in the
context of the song. So to summarize how to use the Google feature and
weird reference imbalance, I would first use
the Google feature to translate words you see repeated and then confirm
that with word reference. And then go back to the
Google feature to see if the definition and
word reference makes sense within the
context of the song. Now, again, the Google feature is not always
completely accurate, but it works to get a general sense of what
the song is about. Now, if your target language
is not included and one of the 15-plus dictionaries available
onward reference, I would suggest just doing an online search
for a dictionary, just like every
lesson before this, learning vocabulary
requires time. So I would suggest
approaching this in baby steps instead of sitting down and trying to go
through a whole song and learn all of his
vocabulary at once. Start with what is
sticking out to you. What are the words
that are repeated? What are words that
may be even look familiar because they look like a word from a language you already speak and go from there. Also work in sections. Take a few lines from a song and you can work on
that in one sitting. Also, you don't want to try to translate every word
because if you're just beginning
trying to translate every word will
leave you exhausted. Now, again, as you go
through this process, pull up that final project
chart and start to fill out that column for vocabulary with words that you've
been able to translate. That's it for this class, your task is to drop ten
new vocabulary words that you've learned in
your target language into the discussion tab below, I'll see you in the next class.
7. Moving Forward: If you've been proactive
about filling out the final class project chart
throughout this course, as I've encouraged you to
do within each lesson, then you've actually already
started this process. That is the essence
of this lesson. Any areas of
uncertainty that you've encountered over the
past few lessons are an opportunity for you to carve your path forward after
the end of this class. What that means is once
this class is done, and if you do indeed want to continue
learning or language, start by addressing
those questions you've listed in the column things
to explore it further and that final project
chart to reiterate some of the things I mentioned
earlier in this course. What you want to have and
that a column of things to explore further questions
about pronunciation, accent marks, vocabulary, etc. There are online resources for most languages to help you start addressing your questions. Although for languages
that are more globally spoken or have a larger
number of speakers, will be a little
bit easier to find online resources compared to languages that have
a fewer number of speakers globally,
regardless, I suggest looking on YouTube
and Google to answer your questions for more
specific questions, I think Google is
a good place to start typing your
specific question. And oftentimes
languages will have blog posts that people
have written addressing that particular question whether its pronunciation,
grammar, vocabulary, etc. Youtube is a good tool to
use if you're looking for a more general
structured progression and your language learning
journey, either way, what you'll find is
once you start going online to try to get
your questions answered, there'll be this sort
of snowball effect where you might get
your question answered, but you will be exposed to
other aspects of the language. So e.g. on this blog post about how to pronounce the letter
R in Brazilian Portuguese. If I scroll down the page, there's a link here that says, learn how to say the months
of the year in Portuguese. And this is what I mean
by a snowball effect. You look for one piece of information and more
likely than not, there's gonna be
another piece of information presented to you. Use those moments to continue
defining your path forward once you come across
something that's new to you or you
don't understand, go in that direction. And that's as much as
I'll say about that, since the focus of
this class is on music, That's it
for this lesson. I'll see you in the
conclusion where we will review the key
takeaways from this class.
8. Conclusion: Before we dive into a
recap of this course, I'd like you to take a second and think about where you were at the beginning of your journey before you started this class. I'm asking you to
do this to notice how far you've come
and how much you've learned about your target
language just by listening to music without engaging in
any sort of formal study. By this point, if you have spent a sufficient amount of time on each of the lessons
in this course, you have developed a
really strong year for your target language. You can probably write
any word you hear. Now, let's recap the process of using music that we learned
throughout this course. First, you want to identify
a song that you'd like. Remember, the song should
also be of a suitable speed. Then you want to listen
to that song a lot, really to the point where it's more or less
stuck in your head. Then once you know
your song well, find the lyrics to the song in the target language and
follow along with the lyrics. No any surprises
and pronunciation. Keep repeating this process with more and more songs
until you feel you've reached a point
where there are little to no more surprises
and pronunciation, once you feel like you've gotten a good grasp of the sounds, different letters and
letter combinations make challenge yourself
even more this time, listened to the music and try to write down what you hear. Keep repeating this process
until you're able to accurately write down a
majority of the words you hear. Remember, this is perhaps the most important step of
this entire methodology, but it takes a lot of time. I promise you, the
more you do it, the easier it will get. And as you're doing this, listening to music and
writing down what you hear, be cognizant of vocabulary that repeats itself
within a song or a cross songs and use your online resources to
verify their translation. Although I've presented the
methodology of this course as a launching pad for your
language learning journey. There are certain lessons that you can carry forward with you even as you progress into advanced stages
of your language. Let's say down the line, you continue with your
language and you're able to listen to podcasts
and Netflix shows. Taking that technique of trying
to write down what you're listening to is always a good
way to challenge yourself. If there's one thing I want you to take away
from this class, it's that you can never listen enough when you're
learning a new language. Remember, as a baby, you became an
expert at listening before you could
even start speaking. Now remember to fill out your final project chart as
you go through this course, it's a good way to organize
everything you've learned as well as give yourself direction
after this class is done. It's also just nice
to have a record of everything you've learned once you reach the end of the class, once you've completed
your class project, I strongly encourage you to post it to the Projects
and Resources tab. I am genuinely curious to see what language you're learning
and to see your progress. So I will leave a comment and feedback on all charts
that are posted. Thank you so much
for your time If you chose to participate
in this class, if you enjoyed the
class and feel so compelled to leave
a positive review. I thank you in advance, also, be sure to follow my
profile on Skillshare to be informed of any new
classes I drop in the future. Thank you and best of
luck on your journey.
Danny Hage, Language Vlogger & Visual Storyteller
