Singing can help you better learn a foreign language

Having trouble learning a new language? Try singing it.

Singing in a foreign language can significantly improve learning how to speak it, according to a new study.

Adults who listened to short Hungarian phrases and then sang them back performed better than those who spoke the phrases, researchers at the University of Edinburgh's Reid School of Music found.

People who sang the phrases back also fared better than those who repeated the phrases by speaking them rhythmically.

Researchers asked three randomly assigned groups of twenty adults to take part in a series of five tests. The singing group performed the best in four of the five tests.
In one test, participants who learned through singing performed twice as well as participants who learned by speaking the phrases. Those who learned by singing were also able to recall the Hungarian phrases with greater accuracy in the longer term.

Hungarian was chosen because it is unfamiliar to most English speakers and a difficult language to master, with a completely different structure and sound system to the Germanic or Romance languages, such as Spanish and French.

"This study provides the first experimental evidence that a listen-and-repeat singing method can support foreign language learning, and opens the door for future research in this area," said Dr Karen M Ludke, who conducted the research as part of her PhD at the University of Edinburgh's Institute for Music in Human and Social Development.

"One question is whether melody could provide an extra cue to jog people's memory, helping them recall foreign words and phrases more easily," Ludke said.
The study was published in Springer's journal Memory & Cognition.