Today's video is gonna be about my method that I use for learning languages through songs.

Now if you're new to this channel,

I produce a new video every Monday and every Friday

about ways that you can learn languages more effectively.

So if that's interesting to you feel free to click on the subscribe button down below.

Now on this channel, my three main goals are to make language learning fast, fun and easy,

and I think learning languages through songs accomplishes all three of those goals.

So my first tip for learning languages with songs and this probably comes as no surprise is just

listening to the song a lot.

So listen while you're in the car listen while you're cooking cleaning

listen while you have any amount of free time,

and my favorite method for that is the Spotify app on my iPad.

They have pretty much every song you can imagine,

and they have all kinds of languages.

So no matter what languages you're learning you they probably have songs in that language.

A Spotify app for the iPad and for the computer is really nice, it's completely free.

The app for your phone is a little bit more limited unless you want the paid subscription,

but on the iPad and on the computer, it's great.

You just have to listen to a short advertisement,

and then you get to listen to whatever music you want.

My next tip is to print off a physical lyrics sheets with a glossary on the side,

and that's exactly what I did. Here you see, I have the lyrics printed off,

and I just found the lyrics to this song and Ultimate-guitar.com.

After I printed it off, I just went through and read the whole song,

and I found a bunch of words that I was not familiar with,

so I wrote those songs (words) over here on the side.

And then when I finished that and went on to wordreference.com,

and I looked up the definitions.

And this is a really helpful thing to reference the first few times you hear the song.

You just read through the lyrics as you listen to the song one or two times,

and then it just takes a few times listening to the song before you know all the words and all their meanings.

That's a really easy way to boost your vocabulary,

and it's going to stop you from getting totally lost in the song every time you listen to it.

So it's gonna make your time more productive.

Now Google translates and word reference can only take you so far when you're translating words word for word,

and anyone who speaks Spanish knows

that this translation that Google Translate gave me is really wrong and really funny.

That's why my second piece of advice for learning languages with songs is

to ask advice from native speakers on apps like Reddit and HiNative.

A lot of times music uses certain phrases and words that are very colloquial

they use a lot of slang, so that's why HiNative is a great resource for this.

HiNative is an app that allows you to ask bite-sized translation related questions to native speakers,

and you can see here I asked a question about

a line from the song that I'm learning.

And I just asked what does this mean because it uses some

slang vocabulary words that I'm just not familiar with,

and then a native speaker of Canadian French came on and she told me what that means,

and you can see

that there's probably a good reason I had no idea what this means because it was a little bit vulgar,

and they don't teach you that kind of stuff in the classroom,

but people online that are native speakers, and they're experts in the dialect.

They'll help you understand what's going on in that song, so this is an invaluable resource.

And Reddit is also a great place where you can go and ask questions.

Just go to the subreddit of whatever language you're learning,

post your question,

and you'll get at least one or two answers within the next hour as long as it's one of the more major languages of the world.

My third tip is to practice these songs while practicing with an actual instrument .

Now if you already play an instrument you probably do this all the time,

so this is just a natural extension and another way for you to incorporate your language into your daily routine.

And if you don't play an instrument yet,

it's actually really easy to get started.

You can get a cheap ukulele on Amazon or on eBay for like twenty to thirty dollars,

and there's all kinds of tutorials on YouTube that will tell you how to play that instrument.

Then all you have to do is just look up the chords for that instrument on ultimate-guitar.com,

and you instantly have a new and exciting way of practicing your language.

This is why I get most of my lyrics off of ultimate-guitar.com,

because they actually give you the chords to go along with the lyrics.

And then it's extremely easy.

You just to pick up the guitar, or sit down at the piano and play through whatever song you want to learn.

Just one more suggestion on the instrument front before we get to my last tip is

this instrument called a strum stick and you've probably never seen anything like this before.

It's really interesting but I promise this is the easiest instrument you will ever play in your entire life.

This is a pretty nice model, and it was a little bit more expensive at about a hundred dollars,

but you can get cheaper versions too.

There's only three strings on this instruments,

and they leave out a bunch of frets making it way simpler to play,

and it makes it so that you can't even play wrong notes for the key that you're playing in.

It's really easy for beginners strum stick players

to just use one finger in just this one string,

and you can actually make some pretty cool music.

Watch me play La Vie En Rose with just one finger on this strum stick.

Once you have your strum stick for a few days,

you can move past the one finger technique and move into very simple chords

that never take more than two fingers.

And believe it or not, you can actually play some pretty complicated stuff on this strum stick,

so it's a lot of fun even for advanced musicians.

Okay, sorry for that side rant about strum sticks.

I'm just really passionate about spreading music,

so I'm not gonna say any more about that.

But if you are interested in this strum stick then you can check out my link right here,

because I think I'm going to start posting more videos on that subject on another channel.

And my last tip is to listen to those songs in slow motion.

And I have two main ways of doing this.

The first and the simplest way is on YouTube

and the second way that is more complex but more customizable is with Audacity.

Now the first method I want to show you is how to slow down in songs on YouTube,

and I just covered this a week or two ago in my pronunciation video,

so I'm not gonna spend too much time on it.

But this is a really nice way to slow down videos on YouTube

so that you can hear exactly how the singers are pronouncing their words,

and I'm gonna first play this song at regular speed,

so you can really listen to how she pronounces these R.

Because she has a really interesting way of pronouncing these R's in the song.

And see how she has those really uvular trilled Rs and that's really interesting.

So I'm gonna slow this down a little bit and just get a better listen.

You can really hear her trilling those Rs when she slows it down.

And you want to be careful because if you slow it down too much,

then you'll really get really distorted sound.

So it's funny, you can really hear her doing that vibrato in there.

Now YouTube is good because it's nice and simple.

You just go to this little thing here, and then you can adjust the speed.

But Audacity is more powerful, and you'll just go to audacityteam.org,

and you have to download this software.

But it's free and it's really nice, and I can actually show you an example right now,

because Audacity is what I'm using to record the audio as we speak.

So I can't show you in a real example because I'm recording it right now.

But what you would do is you would go up here and you would import your favorite song,

using open you just open an mp3 version of the song,

then you would highlight it, highlight the portion that you want to slow down or highlight the whole song

then you'll go to Effect, and you would go to Change Speed.

And I'm in the middle of recording right now, so you can't change the speed.

But if you just had a paused Mp3 then you could change the speed of it,

and you can slow it down to 90% or 95%, 80% if you want.

you but you want to find a good balance of where to slow it down,

because, like over here, if you slow it down to 75%

that's not too bad.

But once you slow it down to 50 that's really distorted.

So you want to keep it around 90, 95 maybe

75 is kind of pushing the edges of it.

But if you slow it down to 90% you can still listen to that song and enjoy.

It's just as a slower version of the song,

and there's not too much distortion at that point.

So this is just a really nice way of being able to slow down a song and really zoom in and get a good idea

get a good idea of exactly what the singer is doing and how they're pronouncing the words.

So I really hope you guys take the initiative to start using music to learn languages,

because I think that's gonna be a big factor in helping you become more fluent in your language.

And before I go,

I'm gonna leave you with a video of myself practicing Esperanto on the piano.