(450) Listening makes perfect

Listening makes perfect

  When you want to learn a foreign language, baby’s way is the best. Of course none of us remember how we learned our mother tongues, but nobody failed this. It doesn’t matter at all whether you are a lazy baby, shy baby or whatever. You surely learned your mother tongue naturally. This is why I say that baby’s way is the best to learn a foreign language.

  What is the baby’s way to learn languages? Most mothers know the baby’s way. Baby does listen to what parents talk to. And baby tries to reply something to them to communicate. It’s very simple. There is no text book, no grammar book and of course no spelling book. First baby picks up sounds of the language and try to reply something. Later baby will find the meaning of the sound by communicating with mother and father.

Here are simple rules.
Rule 1: First, pick up sounds of the language.
Rule 2: Then find meaning of the sounds.
We adults can follow this process when we learn foreign languages. But, as you know, for adults it’s very hard to pick up foreign sentences without their meaning. On the contrary for small children it’s much easier to do it. Unfortunately we forgot how we did it when we were small. So grown up students try to look for some special techniques to memorize them.

  What comes to my mind first is SORAMIMI. It is one of techniques to memorize easily foreign language sentences or words. Soramimi here, is a funny coincidence of sounds between two different languages. Once you found a funny one, you never forget that sentence forever. Let me show you two funny examples. The first one, Japanese sentence ITADAKIMAS meaning “let’s eat”. To English speaking people, this might sound like “Eat a duck and a mouse.”  And the second example is “What time is it now?” To Japanese, this English sentence can be heard like “Hotta imo ijiruna!” This Japanese means “Don’t touch the sweet potato I dug out.” But the problem is that it takes time to find funny Soramimi sounds.

  The next technique is musical score. I recently learned rap music can be written in musical score.

  This Rap music is performed in a song called Joyful joyful. This hymn was sung in a 1993 American movie of Sister Act 2, starring Whoopi Goldberg. 

Musical score can be a tool to perform rap music. I also remember that a certain English teacher once suggested me learn English by rap. I agree to this idea because each language surely has its own rhythm. Mimicking the rhythm is very important for learning languages. I really envy people who can read musical score and do rap with it.

  There is a more surprising story about musical score. One of my acquaintances wrote an essay about Caizares who is a famous Spanish guitarist. I happened to read it.
Caizares delivered a perfect speech in Japanese at his wedding ceremony. His wife is Japanese. He made a musical score of his Japanese speech and performed it perfectly. Wow, what an idea! Musical score of languages would be the most powerful tool to memorize sentences? Should we start learning how to write and read musical scores of languages to become a genius like Caizares? 
 
  No, I don’t think so. I’d like to memorize the sentences by ear. Musicalscores didn’t exist in the beginning of music history. Let’s take Gospel music for an example. Originally gospel music was taught without musical scores. A leader is singing a phrase and the others in the group repeating it straight after. Why not get back to the basic way. Try to remember baby’s way by just listening to the language over and over again. I believe in listening makes perfect. This is my conclusion.
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