Music and Language for French Students

For most people, learning a new language is one of the most difficult things you can do

. French language classes make this a bit more difficult than it needs to be by sometimes putting the cart before the horse. Music and language are very closely related. By understanding how you learn music, you can oftentimes understand an easier way to learn French than from a textbook.

Language and music are both learned mostly by aural processes. In most cases, even individuals who sing or play an instrument will have only a rudimentary knowledge of how to read sheet music, if any at all. This is because music is best learned by hearing followed by imitation. The same is true of learning French. The reading skills tend to come much later. If you're trying to read the language before you can actually speak it, you're probably just teaching yourself the wrong way to pronounce words. It would be the equivalent of an untrained musician trying to learn scales by reading notation that they don't even understand. They might get the basic idea, but the subtleties would be entirely lost on them. If they heard it and imitated it, however, they'd probably get the idea very quickly.

The French language has a somewhat sing-song quality to it, in any regard. It tends to have a pronunciation scheme that sounds a bit crowded compared to English, with a lot of soft sounds bunched together and with one word bleeding into the next. Compare this to the staccato sound of English and, to take the metaphor further, you can see that French and English are very different sounding songs. To learn to speak either one, it's usually very helpful to hear it enough that the sounds don't seem foreign to you anymore.

This way of building familiarity by hearing the language spoken is an effective way to learn to speak French. Otherwise, while you may be able to pick up the alphabet sounds and learn a few phrases fairly quickly, you won't be prepared when you actually have a native speaker talking to you. When you've heard the language a lot, its twists and turns don't surprise you and, most importantly, you understand it well enough to ask about any words you may not have understood. That is one of the first stages in becoming fluent in a new language.

Music and Language for French Students

By: Dr. Dennis Dunham

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