One of the ways that we love to relate to each other all around the world is through some good old fashioned MUSIC! Every culture loves to dance, sing and rock out in some of the most interesting and amazing ways around the world. We have different styles of music from country to country, generation to generation, culture to culture and language to language but we all listen to it and in today’s tech connected society with awesome music programs like Spotify, Rdio, Pandora and GooglePlay it’s now easier than ever to naturally immerse yourself in a foreign language using music.
How Can You Boost Natural Language Immersion?
Spotify is an online music service for streaming an online database of 15 million songs to your desktop for free. (I think it might cost money outside of the US but I pay $10 a month for premium so I can listen offline, without ads and across all of my mobile devices.)
I personally love getting down to some German hip-hop from Cro, French rap from Sinik, and all sorts of other crazy sounding tunes that I discover from the various corners of the globe.
It all started with my most recent trip to Berlin for New Years 2013. I was standing in Alexanderplatz at like 2AM getting a beer or something and I heard this cool German track playing on some distant PA system. I liked the tune of the song so I busted out my iPod touch so I could Shazam it. My iPod only operates if it’s on a wi-fi network so the Shazam app just stored the song for later but I learned that the track name was “Das Geht Ab” by a popular German artist named Frauenarzt. I searched for that track name in Spotify and I found the track and artist in less than a minute. Nice. I then used the related artist tab and artist radio to randomly find all kinds of other artists from Germany and all around the world. Once I got started on other languages and it was all downhill form there. I was hooked like a 5 year old on Fun Dip. I now have several playlists that the artists sing completely in foreign languages. It’s awesome. You can condition your mind to try to understand much more faster or slurred speaking while also learning more colloquial language and dialects simply by listening to foreign music.
Listening to foreign music is a great way to “study” while you are at work or at home on your computer. It’s definitely not the sort of stuff that you learn in text books so be VERY careful when singing along with foreign music because it is often laced with slang, profanity, racism and “low grammar” so you might be learning something like “Imma live fo eva” vs “I am going to live forever”. I have had a few foreign friends tell me that music often contains words that are rude/perverse depending on the context just like in music here in the US (like say “Box” or “Shaft” in American English). These words are not profane all on their own but they can be extremely perverse when combined with other words or in a certain context so it is probably best to tread lightly with your new found lexicon until you can have a native speaker explain the meaning to you and the context in which they are used.
I once met a couple of very drunk german guys in my hostel lobby (don’t stay at The Zebra Hostel in Milan by the way) and they were jumping on the couch at like 2 AM shouting the lyrics to “Rack City” by Tyga. “Rack city, bitch! Rack rack city, bitch!” echoes all throughout the hostel common area. Shortly thereafter they asked me “What means this rock city?” I explained it to them and they instantly felt kind of dumb when they discovered that they had just been singing about girl’s “racks” and putting 10s and 20s on “them titties, bitch” so the whole hostel could hear them. But maybe that was the catalyst to start the conversation that allowed me to enlighten them in the first place. Maybe making a slight fool of yourself through trial and error is a good way to get conversations with native language speakers started. None the less, if you are looking for a great way to learn a more cultural side of language through one of the most natural and common means out there, look no further than online music services like Spotify.
