Yearlyglot

Last week, it was my great honor to receive a copy of Language is Music, a captivating book written by Susanna Zaraysky, about learning languages that seemed to steal the thoughts from my head and the feelings from my heart and pour them all out far more succinctly than I ever could.
About the… continue reading

One theme I really like to emphasize is using music to learn. In fact, one of my most popular posts was the one about learning Italian from Andrea Bocelli. Using music to reinforce your vocabulary is great because it makes learning fun. That’s the most important thing, because if you don’t enjoy it, you’re not going to do it.

A few days ago, we discovered a way to use music to learn a new language. Today, we’re going to try it out first-hand, by examining an Italian song by Andrea Bocelli.

When I first learned Spanish, I was focused on learning words. I went overboard with books, web sites, exercises — I studied grammar, I learned vocabulary, I learned proper usage, mastered more than a dozen verb tenses. In the end, I found I could say almost anything I wanted, express almost any thought.

The irony was that I couldn’t understand a bit of what others were saying to me. For all of my knowledge and study, I was basically helpless — an island of output, completely immune to the sea of input around me.