Tag Archives: study

LyricsGaps – Learn Languages By Listening To Songs

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LyricsGap

Name: LyricsGaps
URL: http://www.lyricsgaps.com

“Music is the doctor of my soul”. That’s what the Doobie Brothers once sang. And it’s something that is more or less carved in stone. Yet, music can take on other professional roles. Preeminently among them is the role of teacher. I mean, just look at the number of people who have learned English by listening to songs. OK, maybe the word “learn” is too much. Nobody becomes a fountain of knowledge by listening to songs by contemporary musicians. But there’s no denying that he will build up a more than respectable vocabulary, and revise his existing word lists that much easier.

Well, he certainly will as long as he has a site like this one at hand. LyricsGaps lets anybody pick up new words by listening to music. The idea is that people choose a language from the many that are offered (including English, Spanish, Italian and French) and pick new vocabulary up by completing blanks in the lyrics of songs in such languages. Continue reading →

SingAndStudy – Learn A Language By Listening To Songs And Playing Word Games

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SingAndStudy

Name: Sing And Study
URL: http://www.singandstudy.com

For students of foreign languages, songs are one of the perfect frameworks for capturing new vocabulary. The reasons are obvious: songs lasts only a couple of minutes, and some sections repeat themselves over and over. And you have a melody to begin with – a melody that can dote whole segments of the composition with instant catchiness, if not the whole song.

I already reviewed one site for learning languages using videos, but this one is a bit different. Named Sing And Study, it stands as a (paid) Adobe application that you download and launch from your desktop. This application will let you create word games with these videos that you like. That is, you will define which words are missing from the lyrics as the song is playing. This has the immediate advantage of letting you set the difficulty level as specifically as you want. A song can be suited to just anybody, since you will determine what will be removed from where.

For instance, you could take “Like A Rolling Stone” and make filling the gaps something easy:

You never _____ around to see the frowns on the jugglers and the clowns
When they all come down and did _____ for you
You never _____ that it ain’t no good
You shouldn’t let other people get your kicks for you
You used to _____ on the chrome horse with your diplomat
Who carried on his shoulder a Siamese cat
Ain’t it _____ when you discover that
He really wasn’t where it’s at
After he took from you everything he could steal Continue reading →