How Spotify can help you learn a foreign language
Music can be a great tool in helping you learn a language.
Immersing yourself in a language is a big key to success, and at LanguageConvo our goal is to help you do that with a professional, native-speaking teacher. But outside of your lessons you can do a lot - like listening to music - that will help you learn a new language!
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How can music help me learn a language?
Good question.
You probably know that immersion is the fastest way to learn a language. Imagine flying to a country where your native language isn't spoken at all, and having to get around; you'll learn the words for "bathroom" and "food" pretty quickly!
Immersion is how we all learned our native language. Simply being around and listening to a language helps you absorb not only the meaning of words, but the tones, inflections, cadence, etc. Many students mistakenly believe that if they aren't actively working on memorizing what a word means or what a grammatical structure is used for, they aren't learning.
That's far from the truth.
So listening to music, even if you don't understand most of it, will help you pick up on things like tones, cadences, inflections, all of which are really useful things to learn. If you take the next step and work on learning what is being said in the song, you'll get even more benefit.
Find Spotify songs that are popular in other countries
Spotify makes it easy to listen to music that is popular in other countries. If you're learning Spanish, choose a Spanish-speaking country and listen to their hit songs!
To do that, just find the "Charts" section of Spotify:
There we can see Bolivia's top 50 songs, for example. Add that playlist to your queue, and start listening!
This is also a really fun way to explore different parts of the world.
Find specific Artists
If you enjoy music, one of the most fun ways to learn the language and culture of a region is to learn about musicians from that region.
Do some Googling and discover some of the most renown musicians from a particular country or region, and then find them on Spotify!
For example, a quick Google search for "top Italian musicians" or "best Italian musicians" leads us to Francesco De Gregori, a celebrated singer-songwriter.
Now we head back to Spotify and voilà, there's enough of his fantastic music to last us for a long, long time!
Just listening is good, but what else can you do?
As we mentioned earlier, just listening to the music can be really helpful, even if you don't understand much of it.
The next step would be learning the vocabulary.
A great way to do this is to first get the lyrics of the song. You can do that for most songs with just a little more Google magic!
Let's take Francesco De Gregori's most popular song on Spotify, La donna cannone. Head to Google and search "lyrics La donna cannone" and we get the full song lyrics!
Use Google Translate or even our EasyListening tool to translate the lyrics to your native language, if needed.