046: Learn English With Songs- A Good Idea?

Hi I'm AJ Hoge the director of Effortless English. It's time for today's student question. Here's the question: Should I use songs to learn English? now this is a very common question, so many students ask me this “AJ should I use songs? Should I listen to music? English music, English songs, pop songs to improve my English? Because, you know this sounds fun right? I understand the question, it sounds fun to listen to music in English to improve your English.

However you may not like my answer but I say NO. Do not use songs to learn English. If you enjoy songs that are in English, fine listen to the music because you enjoy the music, dance, have fun, enjoy it, but it's probably not going to help your English listening or speaking very much. Why not? well the main reason is that songs are very hard to understand, most of them, I mean to be honest when I listen to pop songs or rock music or whatever, hip-hop, if I listen to it many times I can't understand the words it's hard to hear what they're saying because when, when people sing they change the way they pronounce words they change the natural way of speaking right, they're not speaking they're singing. So, you probably know this in your own language. Sometimes you listen to songs in your own language you can't understand what they're saying. So that's the first problem, it's hard to understand, many times it's hard to understand.

Problem number two. Even if you understand the words, the individual words, you probably won't understand the meaning. You may not understand the meaning. Again, I don't understand the meaning of many songs. Why? because it's, it's like poetry sometimes there is no obvious meaning, right? it's a lot of different words but, who knows what it means we have no idea maybe the person who wrote it doesn't know, right. So this is a bad way to learn English because you're listening to something that's hard to understand, the pronunciation is unnatural and the actual meaning of the sentences is unclear, strange, it's more like poetry, it's not normal English conversation.

So for all these reasons, using songs to improve your English speaking it's just generally not a good idea, don't do it it. You're wasting your time, listen to, you know, real conversations, listen to audiobooks, even listen to something like this like just someone speaking real normal English that is much better. Focus on that with your English listening, not on songs. Enjoy the songs have fun with them but don't include them in your English learning. And that's today's question. To learn more about the effortless English system visit our website at effortlessEnglishclub.com, I see you there bye bye.