Learn Greek
Music is one of life’s simple pleasures, but did you know that it could also help you learn a foreign language? Here’s how music can be an invaluable tool when learning Greek:
Greek pronunciation
Trying to pronounce new foreign words can be embarrassing and daunting, particularly if you’re a teenage or adult learner. When you’re singing along to a foreign song, you’re concentrating more on the pace and tone than the words themselves, which can help in overcoming self-consciousness.
Greek word boundaries
When speaking fluently, we generally don’t pause between words. This can be challenging for a non-native speaker. A recent study discovered that we are able to distinguish between words much quicker when they are set to music.
Greek vocabulary
There is a strong link between music and memory – similar areas of the brain are activated when listening to or playing music and speaking or processing language. Research from the University of Edinburgh found that singing words or phrases in a foreign language makes us twice as good at speaking it later.
Greek culture
Greek music is an inherent part of Greek culture. The provenance of a song – its short history, the social conditions and the historical events of its era, the feelings of the people, the stories of the songwriters – but also the music genres (Rembetiko, folk, pop etc.) have the power to shape the culture of the country.
“A song or a poem can be a window into one country or language, like a borehole into another world, and that in itself gives so much depth to the language you’re learning”, -Richard Stokes.
