French phonetics: practising sounds with songs
Listening to songs in the language you're learning can not only be enjoyable, but also incredibly beneficial for your pronunciation. Especially if you know how to do it correctly.
I propose to proceed according to plan:
1. First, you need to want to sing along. Therefore, we choose c as our favorite song.
Don't spend too much time digging through your playlist. Take the one on top.
We find the text on the Internet. Let's run our eyes over it.
2. You can translate everything using a dictionary to make it clearer what we are talking about. Or you can just relax and try to sing, understanding little of anything, in a whisper, slightly looking into the text, but with pleasure.
And I'm exactly for this.
Because now the main goal is sounds and intonation. Focus on them for now.
3. I’m sure, even if you don’t understand anything in this song yet, after listening to it on repeat, and even armed with the lyrics, you will definitely catch some words and meanings and you will feel better.
It's time to figure out everything else. Underline unfamiliar words in the text. Look them up in the dictionary.
If you still can’t put everything together into a single picture, find a translation of the entire song. Often it is even foldable.
4. Choose a piece that you particularly like. This is 3-4-8 lines. We read the text carefully, word by word. Then we turn on the song and “copy-paste” what we hear.
Until you get bored, try to memorize this passage.
You should be able to do 3-4 repetitions – then it gets boring.
5. Let's stop mocking ourselves. We turn on the song from the very beginning, sing it in full voice, sneak a peek somewhere, somewhere from memory.
Don't try to remember every word. If you sing again tomorrow, you won’t forget the day after tomorrow. Don't worry too much about grammar. Grasp the general meaning, mood, rhythm. And enjoy the fact that you already understand, pronounce, sing and do it from the heart.
This has a much stronger effect on your motivation and interest than 100 memorized verbs per day, even if so far it’s some kind of “shizgara”. Is that how they sang this famous song too?