Long, Pier-Luc

Professor Jeanette Novakovich

ENGL 213/2 B
October 5, 2010

A Critique of “Learning through music and the media”

Most people, at one point or another, have tried to learn a new language. May it be your

second, fourth, or tenth language, each and every one of them has differences and brings new

grammatical and technical aspects. The learning of languages has been a hot topic for many

years; more and more people try to be as multilingual as they can be. But which learning method

is the best? School classes? Online classes? Injection into the linguistic community? In

“Learning through music and the media,” Susanna Zaraysky states that languages can easily be

learnt through listening to music or watching TV shows and movies in the language you want to

learn. This statement might be relevant when it comes to learning about the cultural aspects of a

language, but there is a lot more about a language than its music and media.

Zaraysky explains that she personally has learnt some of the seven languages she speaks

through those methods. She states “music engages more areas of the brain than language does.”

(Zaraysky, 2) In this way, music makes a language easier to learn. Zaraysky gives examples of

some of her friends who have watched American television and, in this way, have learnt perfect

American English pronunciation. She says the same for Spanish and Portuguese. Through lively

examples, she makes the reader want to try her methods of learning for every language. In her

writing, Susanna Zaraysky tries to convince her public that music and media are a way to get a

good grip on a language’s basis, and maybe its grammar.

The author uses many examples in her writing, but her examples are more or less valid as

they are provided by friends of hers or people she met. She notes that some of her acquaintances

*Citations are provided by paragraph number

have learnt languages only through the music medium but she lacks support for her statements.

Are these acquaintances trustworthy or are they not? Zaraysky also does not use any outside

sources or quotations; everything she writes is from her experiences only, which brings an

ambiguity to her statements. The lack of sources or outside support makes her statements

doubtful and too personal.

On the brighter side, her use of familiar terms makes it easier for the readers to relate and

her defining foreign quotations helps the inexperienced reader understand her examples.

Although I agree with the fact that music and the media helps the inexperienced student

in a cultural way, I do not believe that this is the main or only aspect to language learning.

Learning about these aspects makes it easier when it comes to learning about the culture of a

certain country or language community and also helps with the knowledge of familiar speech but

that is not a language’s base. The base of all languages is the grammar and the syntax. Yes, it is

possible to learn some special verbs or words or sentence placements with a song but very often

it is not the proper words, syntax, and so on. It is very important to have a good foundation of a

language’s grammar before being able to speak convincingly. Once again, though, I agree that

music and the media helps in the knowledge of familiar vocabulary and culture.

Through her writing, she succeeds in making it seem more interesting and easier

to learn a language through music as you hear the pronunciation and the accents of the language.

Those are two very important aspects of a language. A native speaker knows where to put the

accents and how to pronounce the words of their language but it is more efficiently learnt in a

classroom as, not only do you learn the pronunciation of words, but you also learn why they are

pronounced in such a way and why they are accented the way they are too.
 In the long run, I think it is important to learn about a language’s culture and its

mediated notions but it is also important to know the base of a language in order to fully grasp it.

Learning a language can be a hard task but as Susanna Zaraysky states: “Enjoy the learning

process and you will learn much more.” (Zaraysky, 8)

 Work Cited
Zaraysky, Susanna. “Learning through music and media”. Omniglot. Simon Ager, n.d. Web. 29
Sept. 2010.