Use songs to learn English
It’s interesting to me that I can’t remember what I had for lunch yesterday, but I can remember a song from 1988! A song that I haven’t heard in over 30 years, suddenly, if I hear it, I know all the words and can sing it!!!!!!
How do I remember all those words and lyrics? This happens to you too, right?
What does this mean? It means that songs are a powerful tool that you could use to improve your English. In fact, I use it to improve my Spanish all the time!
Learning English songs will increase your vocabulary, introduce you to common collocations and idioms in English, improve your listening skills, and if you practise singing these songs, it will also help you improve your pronunciation and fluency. That is a lot of English practise for something that is really fun to do.
So, here are my 10 tips on how to use songs to improve your English:
- Listen to Australian radio stations to find English songs that you like the sound of.
- Use youtube to find the songs/artists you like.
- Choose songs with clear lyrics (=words)
- Listen actively and try to understand the meaning. Listen to the same song again and again.
- Use google to find the lyrics and use a dictionary to help learn new words.
- Read the words quietly in your head.
- Read the words aloud to practise pronunciation.
- Try listening and singing along in your head.
- Try listening and moving your mouth to the same rhythm as the song.
- Try listening and singing the song to practise pronunciation and fluency.
The secret to making this successful is repetition. Listening and singing the song many times, which is what we all do with our favourite songs anyway. You could create a play list of your favourite English songs on spotify.
Before I forget, there are even great websites dedicated to using songs to practise your English, click here to see my favourite. Oh and I actually wrote a blog about another listening website that I strongly recommend you use!
Finally, if you are looking for some of my favourite English songs, below are the links to youtube videos with lyrics. Let me know if you like them!