Music teaches us languages.

This week I've decided to write about my experience learning languages through music. As the last two weeks we talked in class about gamification and the use of games in class in order to teach English, I started to think how much music has helped me to learn languages.

It is nothing new that when we are little kids and we start to learn English most of the lessons start or end with a song related to the content we saw that day. Nonetheless, when I was young I started to listen to a lot of music in English like Queen or Pink Floyd. Later, I discovered Jonas Brothers and tried to translate some of their lyrics to understand better what they said.

Nowadays, I still listen to a lot of English music but also other languages like German, Finnish, Italian or Catalan. In fact, last summer I spent a few weeks with some friends that are Catalonian and I started to listen a lot Oques Grasses, a Catalonian group. Thus, as I did when I listened to Jonas Brothers, I searched the lyrics of some songs I really liked about this group and tried to understand them or translate them with the help of some friends (and also Google, not gonna lie). Moreover, one of my best friends has such a high level of Japanese just because she really liked translating some lyrics of Japanese groups into Spanish or English!

What I am trying to say is that music can have also a very important role in our lessons. No matter how old our students are, I'm sure that I would be able to find some music or group that they may like. I think that we have a lot of resources at our fingertips but we don't really use it because we are afraid (or because we are not able to do it, to be honest). Nonetheless, I really hope that future generations of teachers will take some risks (even us!) in lessons in order to improve how students feel about languages.