{"id":3,"date":"2009-03-30T10:26:19","date_gmt":"2009-03-30T10:26:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/217.174.241.229:152\/blog\/2009\/03\/30\/sing-to-learn\/"},"modified":"2009-06-01T15:28:50","modified_gmt":"2009-06-01T15:28:50","slug":"sing-to-learn","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/2009\/03\/30\/sing-to-learn\/","title":{"rendered":"Sing to Learn"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Whilst living in New Zealand, I attempted classes in <a href=\"http:\/\/www.maorilanguage.net\/\">Maori<\/a>, the language of the indigenous people.<\/p>\n<p>Having not attempted to pick up more than a smattering of foreign words in the years since school, it was a strange experience attempting to wrap my tongue around some different pronunciations and sounds!<\/p>\n<p>One of the techniques I found easiest was to use music and song. Whilst it was definitely embarrassing to sing with and in front of a group of (virtual) strangers, the songs helped new words stick in my mind. A great side benefit was getting a sense of Maori culture along with the language.<\/p>\n<p>One song in particular stands out &#8211; to the tune of &#8220;Old McDonald Has a Farm&#8221; (an English nursery rhyme), we sang the tale of <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Tangaroa\">Tangaroa<\/a>, a Maori God of the sea. It was difficult not to slip into the more familiar words!<\/p>\n<p>Nursery rhymes are great for learning simpler words, but for a bigger challenge which may be more suited to your musical tastes, try the huge range of music that is available in every language. From <a href=\"http:\/\/worldmusiccentral.org\/article.php?story=20040907093802703\">Brazilian hip hop<\/a> (Portuguese) to <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Cantopop\">Cantonese pop<\/a>, listening to music in a different language is a great way to pick up new words and aspects of culture at the same time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Whilst living in New Zealand, I attempted classes in Maori, the language of the indigenous people. Having not attempted to pick up more than a smattering of foreign words in the years since school, it was a strange experience attempting to wrap my tongue around some different pronunciations and sounds! One of the techniques I [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[20,21],"class_list":["post-3","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education","tag-maori","tag-music"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26,"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3\/revisions\/26"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}