Using music instead of a language course in learning a foreign language
In my previous material , the use of the language course at the initial stages of learning a foreign language (as part of the Umin method, for English) was considered. Practice has shown that the big problem of language courses is their dullness, lack of interest. With insufficient motivation, this problem can become insurmountable and make further learning impossible.
Further, for concreteness, learning English will be assumed everywhere, but all of this applies to any other language.
The purpose of this material is to replace linguaphone courses with some more interesting and easily digestible content that would provide elaboration (sorting, understanding, pronunciation) of approximately the same amount of English-language content (texts and audio recordings) as a language lab course.
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The main requirement for such content is its availability simultaneously in three versions: English audio recording, the corresponding English text, the corresponding Russian text (translation), and also the readiness to listen to it many times (at least 20-30 times) and the total duration corresponding to the average language course ( 2-3 hours of audio).
For most people, the content that best meets these requirements is musical compositions in English. In this material, the term "composition" refers to the combination of the three above-mentioned content options for the same song. I specifically use the term “compositions” instead of “songs” in this material to emphasize a very important and repeatedly proven moment - listening to songs in English is in itself, without understanding and / or without combining relevant texts, does not give anything in terms of learning language.
At this stage, you will need to choose to begin with about 20 songs that are well known to you by ear, that is, you have already heard them many times in the past, even without an understanding of the meaning of the words. It is advisable that they be known for as long as possible - so that past auditions are distributed over as long as possible. That is, for example, it is better to take what is already familiar for three years compared with what is familiar for three months.
The recommendations below are designed for the presence of a computer (desktop or laptop) and an Internet connection that is sufficiently stable and of high quality to play audio from there.
For a start, it will be enough to collect about 20 compositions, then in a similar way it will be possible to collect more and bring the total number to about 50, which will roughly correspond to the volume of the language laboratory.
Similarly, you can handle the history of listening to audio in some popular social networks, allowing you to place audio in user profiles.
Next, we browse (if any) the folders with the saved mp3-files on the computer and mobile devices, copy the names of suitable compositions and from there into the same text file.
The above figures - 20 and 50 - are indicative, it is quite normal if there is a little less or a little more.
Next, we rearrange the lines in this text file so that what is most suitable or most interesting is closer to its beginning.
Open the site . We need the functionality of this site (more precisely, its full, desktop version) that songs and words are presented to them there as “compositions”, and access is possible simultaneously to each of its three elements - while listening you can simultaneously watch English and Russian text, since their respective lines are aligned with each other.
In addition to English, compositions are also available on this site for learning Spanish, Italian, German and French.
If you still plan to work without using a computer and do all the exercises from a smartphone or tablet, the site will be redirected to the mobile version, but it does not work as it should - the English and Russian texts are not displayed at the same time, therefore in the mobile version of the site you will need to open menu (top left) and click on this menu "Full Version". Also, most likely, you will need to rotate the screen of your smartphone or tablet 90 degrees (in landscape orientation) in order to fit both columns of text normally.
There is another similar site , but it’s inconvenient that the pages contain only two parts of the compositions of three - English and Russian texts, and the audio must be stored and opened separately each time (as another link or mp3 file).
We create the folder “English” in the browser bookmarks , and inside it there are two more folders - “Unassembled” and “Disassembled” .
In turn, we enter the names of compositions from a text file into a search on lyrsense.com, if the composition is found there, then we start playing the audio, check that this is exactly what is needed (and not an arranged or simplified version) and, if so, add a bookmark for the found lyrsence.som page with a song in the “Unsorted” folder.
Repeat until about 20 bookmarks are typed in this folder.
It is also highly desirable to install the Google Dictionary extension in the browser before starting the training.
It should be noted that lyrsense.com and similar sites have similar functionality - by a single mouse click on a word, its translation and pronunciation are displayed. But the Google Dictionary extension is more universal, because it works on all sites.
It is highly desirable to perform the exercises listed above daily and spend on them at least half an hour during the day - this is not so difficult - as will be shown below, in most cases it will be possible to combine them with other things.
Further, when describing the exercises, they will conduct their analogy with the book by E. A. Umin "English is easy and with pleasure."
I note that the exercise L1 in accordance with this book has already been actually completed, since the songs that have already been listened to many times before were selected.
It is enough to perform this exercise once for each of the compositions, just before beginning to listen to it as part of the training. Subsequently, it can be repeated (but this is not necessary) - if the English text does not become clearer after several auditions or even more often - for example, before first listening to the composition during the day. Repeating this exercise will take an order of magnitude less time than the first.
You should not try to perform it for all the songs at once, since it is quite laborious and requires fixing the mastered material by listening to the audio with tracking through the text immediately after finding out the meaning of English words.
The purpose of this exercise is to find Russian equivalents for all English words in the text of the composition, with the exception of auxiliary words such as a, the, do, have , etc. In this case, it is not necessary to remember them - by the end of the text being analyzed it’s likely to show that You forget what corresponds to it at the beginning. This is quite normal, it is enough to sort the lines one by one, do not try to remember them all at once.
In accordance with the classification from the book of Umin, this will correspond to exercise L3 (~ L3) . Further, the combination of ~ L <number> will indicate compliance with the exercise from there.
Turn on playback and listen to audio. In parallel, we look at the English text and find the correspondence between sound and words in the text (~ L2) . When an incomprehensible fragment appears in the English text, we try to immediately find it in the Russian text (~ L4) . At the same time, audio playback can be stopped, but you can not, as you prefer.
Each of the songs in the learning process will be listened to several dozen times, so it is not necessary to try to make out all at once at the first auditions.
It is advisable to listen to the composition in a row 2-4 times at the beginning of work with her, for this you need to press the auto-repeat button.
As you repeat listening to the same composition, the need to use texts to pick up sounds will be less and less. Therefore, more and more time when performing this exercise, you can simply devote to rest or some simple things that do not require high concentration. Looking into the texts in this case it is necessary only when it is necessary to disassemble an incomprehensible fragment from the audio.
When the need to look at the texts while listening to any composition disappears altogether, the composition should be moved to the Disassembled folder for use in the next exercise.
First of all, you should understand that the actions listed below can be considered as exercises only if the audio you listened to was first parsed using the accompanying texts and you can correctly isolate all the words when listening.
It is very important not to put the songs in the Disassembled folder until they are really disassembled. In itself, listening to incomprehensible materials in English does not give anything in terms of language acquisition.
The principal difference of this exercise from the previous one is that it can be performed in parallel with other simple tasks that do not require concentration, i.e., the study of English requires almost no additional time.
Open the "Disassembled" folder, select a song, turn on its playback and listen, while tracking the understanding of individual words (~ L5) . In this case, you can immediately turn on auto-repeat and listen to it 2-4 times or more, until you get bored. When playing, you can do other things, but keep in mind that they should be simple and allow you to constantly pay some attention to what the audio content you are listening to really understands and you can correctly divide it into separate words.
If, while listening, you find that the audio content does not understand , then stop listening, turn off playback, move this song from the “Disassembled” folder to “Unassembled” and proceed to listen to some other song from the “Disassembled” folder. That is, it is necessary to move on to the same exercise for a different composition, and not to the previous exercise for the same composition — that’s more convenient.
If you find that you have already memorized certain fragments of audio and are not very busy, you can try to speak these fragments (out loud or to yourself) immediately after the audio (~ L7) or immediately before it (~ L9) . But it is not necessary to do this, it is enough just to make sure that all (or almost all) words are understood.
This is an optional exercise, you can completely do without them.
These exercises are in a separate section because they do not require access to audio recordings and can be performed anywhere, in any conditions where concentration on something else is not required - even in public places and at work (since it is not necessary to speak out loud) .
We create the folder “Englsh Mobile” , but not in the browser bookmarks on the computer, but in the file system on the smartphone (on the computer this is all already available through the browser). We copy there text files with English texts of compositions from the folder "Disassembled". You can also use this folder to store audio files for these songs.
Then you can use text files from Englsh Mobile to pronounce texts - out loud or to yourself (~ 8) , and audio files - for listening with an understanding of the English text (~ 5) or pronouncing it (~ 7, ~ 9) . Such an organization of work makes it possible to do these exercises almost everywhere, without being tied to a computer and a workplace.
If you find that you can memorize a composition by heart, you can create a separate folder “Learned” in the browser’s tabs, move it to this folder and continue to work with it and other memorized compositions, simply by saying it out loud or to yourself, without audio recording (~ L12) . Pronunciation of the text learned by heart is even easier to implement, since it does not even require access to a smartphone.
It seems to me that the “special nature of the human brain” ... unique relationship between music and our brains (the “special nature of the activity pattern of music playing and singing in the human brain ... the unique relationship between music and our brain”) simplified. It is necessary to consider not only the brain, but the whole body as a whole. I think that the entire nervous system takes part in multimodal education, and this participation is active - it does not boil down only to the transmission of impulses. T. e. The expression “think with the heart” (automatism of emotions) and “think with the spinal cord” (automatism of movements) in fact should be understood in a literal rather than a figurative sense.
It seems to me that the theories connected with this are most fully revealed not in Western science, but in Eastern practices (such as yoga, Buddhism, etc.). I liked the description of these practices in the book of P. D. Assumption "In Search of the Miraculous" ( theory of the fourth way and control centers ), since there they made an attempt to describe these phenomena as clearly as possible in the language used in Western science, so I tried to take the terminology of this section mainly from there.
Most likely, the effectiveness of multimodal education in this case is due to the fact that two control centers — intellectual (conscious and subconscious) and emotional (what is called a “heart” —but they are not the heart, but solar plexus). For these concepts, such names as “energy centers”, “thin centers”, “chakras” , etc. are also common. It should also be noted that these concepts are often also used in popular and pseudoscientific literature.
From western science, Howard Gardner’s multiple intelligence theory , which assumes the existence of separate “intelligences” for various aspects of human activity and a very weak relationship between them, comes closest to this. The word “intellects” is used in this way rather in the sense of “ability”, in contrast to its generally accepted meaning: “Generally, linguistic and logical-mathematical abilities are called intelligences , but artistic, musical , athletic, etc. abilities are not . Gardner argues needlessly aggrandized.
Basically, language teaching methods take into account only the intellectual center - consciousness (traditional teaching methods) or consciousness + subconscious (non-traditional). The involvement of the emotional center significantly increases the effectiveness of training because it works with much greater speed and automatism.
Further, for concreteness, learning English will be assumed everywhere, but all of this applies to any other language.
The purpose of this material is to replace linguaphone courses with some more interesting and easily digestible content that would provide elaboration (sorting, understanding, pronunciation) of approximately the same amount of English-language content (texts and audio recordings) as a language lab course.
')
The main requirement for such content is its availability simultaneously in three versions: English audio recording, the corresponding English text, the corresponding Russian text (translation), and also the readiness to listen to it many times (at least 20-30 times) and the total duration corresponding to the average language course ( 2-3 hours of audio).
For most people, the content that best meets these requirements is musical compositions in English. In this material, the term "composition" refers to the combination of the three above-mentioned content options for the same song. I specifically use the term “compositions” instead of “songs” in this material to emphasize a very important and repeatedly proven moment - listening to songs in English is in itself, without understanding and / or without combining relevant texts, does not give anything in terms of learning language.
Material preparation
At this stage, you will need to choose to begin with about 20 songs that are well known to you by ear, that is, you have already heard them many times in the past, even without an understanding of the meaning of the words. It is advisable that they be known for as long as possible - so that past auditions are distributed over as long as possible. That is, for example, it is better to take what is already familiar for three years compared with what is familiar for three months.
The recommendations below are designed for the presence of a computer (desktop or laptop) and an Internet connection that is sufficiently stable and of high quality to play audio from there.
For a start, it will be enough to collect about 20 compositions, then in a similar way it will be possible to collect more and bring the total number to about 50, which will roughly correspond to the volume of the language laboratory.
- We open the history of views on YouTube
- Copy from there to some text file the names of suitable compositions (by the criteria listed above)
- We do a search on YouTube by the names (names) of the performers in order to find more (again, considering the criteria - the content should not only be interesting, but also somewhat familiar) and also copy them into a text file
Similarly, you can handle the history of listening to audio in some popular social networks, allowing you to place audio in user profiles.
Next, we browse (if any) the folders with the saved mp3-files on the computer and mobile devices, copy the names of suitable compositions and from there into the same text file.
The above figures - 20 and 50 - are indicative, it is quite normal if there is a little less or a little more.
Next, we rearrange the lines in this text file so that what is most suitable or most interesting is closer to its beginning.
Open the site . We need the functionality of this site (more precisely, its full, desktop version) that songs and words are presented to them there as “compositions”, and access is possible simultaneously to each of its three elements - while listening you can simultaneously watch English and Russian text, since their respective lines are aligned with each other.
In addition to English, compositions are also available on this site for learning Spanish, Italian, German and French.
If you still plan to work without using a computer and do all the exercises from a smartphone or tablet, the site will be redirected to the mobile version, but it does not work as it should - the English and Russian texts are not displayed at the same time, therefore in the mobile version of the site you will need to open menu (top left) and click on this menu "Full Version". Also, most likely, you will need to rotate the screen of your smartphone or tablet 90 degrees (in landscape orientation) in order to fit both columns of text normally.
There is another similar site , but it’s inconvenient that the pages contain only two parts of the compositions of three - English and Russian texts, and the audio must be stored and opened separately each time (as another link or mp3 file).
We create the folder “English” in the browser bookmarks , and inside it there are two more folders - “Unassembled” and “Disassembled” .
In turn, we enter the names of compositions from a text file into a search on lyrsense.com, if the composition is found there, then we start playing the audio, check that this is exactly what is needed (and not an arranged or simplified version) and, if so, add a bookmark for the found lyrsence.som page with a song in the “Unsorted” folder.
Repeat until about 20 bookmarks are typed in this folder.
It is also highly desirable to install the Google Dictionary extension in the browser before starting the training.
It should be noted that lyrsense.com and similar sites have similar functionality - by a single mouse click on a word, its translation and pronunciation are displayed. But the Google Dictionary extension is more universal, because it works on all sites.
It is highly desirable to perform the exercises listed above daily and spend on them at least half an hour during the day - this is not so difficult - as will be shown below, in most cases it will be possible to combine them with other things.
Further, when describing the exercises, they will conduct their analogy with the book by E. A. Umin "English is easy and with pleasure."
I note that the exercise L1 in accordance with this book has already been actually completed, since the songs that have already been listened to many times before were selected.
Clarification of the meaning of English words in the text
It is enough to perform this exercise once for each of the compositions, just before beginning to listen to it as part of the training. Subsequently, it can be repeated (but this is not necessary) - if the English text does not become clearer after several auditions or even more often - for example, before first listening to the composition during the day. Repeating this exercise will take an order of magnitude less time than the first.
You should not try to perform it for all the songs at once, since it is quite laborious and requires fixing the mastered material by listening to the audio with tracking through the text immediately after finding out the meaning of English words.
The purpose of this exercise is to find Russian equivalents for all English words in the text of the composition, with the exception of auxiliary words such as a, the, do, have , etc. In this case, it is not necessary to remember them - by the end of the text being analyzed it’s likely to show that You forget what corresponds to it at the beginning. This is quite normal, it is enough to sort the lines one by one, do not try to remember them all at once.
In accordance with the classification from the book of Umin, this will correspond to exercise L3 (~ L3) . Further, the combination of ~ L <number> will indicate compliance with the exercise from there.
Listening to audio with parallel text viewing
Turn on playback and listen to audio. In parallel, we look at the English text and find the correspondence between sound and words in the text (~ L2) . When an incomprehensible fragment appears in the English text, we try to immediately find it in the Russian text (~ L4) . At the same time, audio playback can be stopped, but you can not, as you prefer.
Each of the songs in the learning process will be listened to several dozen times, so it is not necessary to try to make out all at once at the first auditions.
It is advisable to listen to the composition in a row 2-4 times at the beginning of work with her, for this you need to press the auto-repeat button.
As you repeat listening to the same composition, the need to use texts to pick up sounds will be less and less. Therefore, more and more time when performing this exercise, you can simply devote to rest or some simple things that do not require high concentration. Looking into the texts in this case it is necessary only when it is necessary to disassemble an incomprehensible fragment from the audio.
When the need to look at the texts while listening to any composition disappears altogether, the composition should be moved to the Disassembled folder for use in the next exercise.
Listening to parsed audio without parallel text viewing
First of all, you should understand that the actions listed below can be considered as exercises only if the audio you listened to was first parsed using the accompanying texts and you can correctly isolate all the words when listening.
It is very important not to put the songs in the Disassembled folder until they are really disassembled. In itself, listening to incomprehensible materials in English does not give anything in terms of language acquisition.
The principal difference of this exercise from the previous one is that it can be performed in parallel with other simple tasks that do not require concentration, i.e., the study of English requires almost no additional time.
Open the "Disassembled" folder, select a song, turn on its playback and listen, while tracking the understanding of individual words (~ L5) . In this case, you can immediately turn on auto-repeat and listen to it 2-4 times or more, until you get bored. When playing, you can do other things, but keep in mind that they should be simple and allow you to constantly pay some attention to what the audio content you are listening to really understands and you can correctly divide it into separate words.
If, while listening, you find that the audio content does not understand , then stop listening, turn off playback, move this song from the “Disassembled” folder to “Unassembled” and proceed to listen to some other song from the “Disassembled” folder. That is, it is necessary to move on to the same exercise for a different composition, and not to the previous exercise for the same composition — that’s more convenient.
If you find that you have already memorized certain fragments of audio and are not very busy, you can try to speak these fragments (out loud or to yourself) immediately after the audio (~ L7) or immediately before it (~ L9) . But it is not necessary to do this, it is enough just to make sure that all (or almost all) words are understood.
Speak learned text without audio (optional)
This is an optional exercise, you can completely do without them.
These exercises are in a separate section because they do not require access to audio recordings and can be performed anywhere, in any conditions where concentration on something else is not required - even in public places and at work (since it is not necessary to speak out loud) .
We create the folder “Englsh Mobile” , but not in the browser bookmarks on the computer, but in the file system on the smartphone (on the computer this is all already available through the browser). We copy there text files with English texts of compositions from the folder "Disassembled". You can also use this folder to store audio files for these songs.
Then you can use text files from Englsh Mobile to pronounce texts - out loud or to yourself (~ 8) , and audio files - for listening with an understanding of the English text (~ 5) or pronouncing it (~ 7, ~ 9) . Such an organization of work makes it possible to do these exercises almost everywhere, without being tied to a computer and a workplace.
If you find that you can memorize a composition by heart, you can create a separate folder “Learned” in the browser’s tabs, move it to this folder and continue to work with it and other memorized compositions, simply by saying it out loud or to yourself, without audio recording (~ L12) . Pronunciation of the text learned by heart is even easier to implement, since it does not even require access to a smartphone.
Theoretical assumptions - why texts with music or rhyme are easier to learn than without them
It seems to me that the “special nature of the human brain” ... unique relationship between music and our brains (the “special nature of the activity pattern of music playing and singing in the human brain ... the unique relationship between music and our brain”) simplified. It is necessary to consider not only the brain, but the whole body as a whole. I think that the entire nervous system takes part in multimodal education, and this participation is active - it does not boil down only to the transmission of impulses. T. e. The expression “think with the heart” (automatism of emotions) and “think with the spinal cord” (automatism of movements) in fact should be understood in a literal rather than a figurative sense.
It seems to me that the theories connected with this are most fully revealed not in Western science, but in Eastern practices (such as yoga, Buddhism, etc.). I liked the description of these practices in the book of P. D. Assumption "In Search of the Miraculous" ( theory of the fourth way and control centers ), since there they made an attempt to describe these phenomena as clearly as possible in the language used in Western science, so I tried to take the terminology of this section mainly from there.
Most likely, the effectiveness of multimodal education in this case is due to the fact that two control centers — intellectual (conscious and subconscious) and emotional (what is called a “heart” —but they are not the heart, but solar plexus). For these concepts, such names as “energy centers”, “thin centers”, “chakras” , etc. are also common. It should also be noted that these concepts are often also used in popular and pseudoscientific literature.
From western science, Howard Gardner’s multiple intelligence theory , which assumes the existence of separate “intelligences” for various aspects of human activity and a very weak relationship between them, comes closest to this. The word “intellects” is used in this way rather in the sense of “ability”, in contrast to its generally accepted meaning: “Generally, linguistic and logical-mathematical abilities are called intelligences , but artistic, musical , athletic, etc. abilities are not . Gardner argues needlessly aggrandized.
Basically, language teaching methods take into account only the intellectual center - consciousness (traditional teaching methods) or consciousness + subconscious (non-traditional). The involvement of the emotional center significantly increases the effectiveness of training because it works with much greater speed and automatism.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/331454/
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