Listening is one of the trickiest skills for Spanish learners, mainly because of native speakers’ pace.
Though you can’t change how people speak a language, you can expose yourself as much as possible to the language till your ears get used to it.
One fun and easy way to do so is by listening to music in Spanish.
In this article, you’ll learn about the benefits of listening to music in Spanish and get a Spotify playlist to start practicing right after reading this post.
Natural pace and pronunciation
In general, Spanish learners find the cadence of the language to be too fast, and this is because the pace of our own mother tongue influences the rhythm perception.
Think about Spanish and Italian, which are quite similar languages in this regard because they’re both romance languages. Italians are less likely to struggle with listening to Spanish than English speakers.
But the fact you speak English doesn’t mean you won’t be able to understand Spanish speakers. And here’s when music enters into play.
Music can help you train your ear for different paces and pronunciations of Spanish native speakers.
Check the difference between these two songs:
The pace will depend greatly on the music genre, but you can find different rhythms across songs, even within the same one.
In the case of Shakira’s song, this shift is pretty clear. She starts slowly and goes a bit faster in the chorus.
This is good practice because people speak this way too in real life.
Variety of dialects and accents
Unless you travel to Spain only, you’ll notice that there are as many accents and dialects as Spanish-speaking countries in the world.
These regional differences might be challenging, but fruitful at the same time. You might opt for one dialect for your regular lessons, but listen to different ones through music.
Listening to different Spanish dialects and accents will help you broaden the scope of material you’ll be able to work with as well as the people you could interact with in real instances. In other words, you don’t restrain yourself and increase your chances of using your Spanish in different scenarios.
Besides, though each dialect has differences in lexical terms, the overall Spanish grammar is the same across countries so it won’t hurt your Spanish listening to music in Spanish from different countries.
In the Spotify playlist below, you’ll find musicians from Mexico, Colombia, Argentina, Spain, and Puerto Rico.
Would you add any song or artist to the playlist? Let me know in the comments 😀
Repetition and reinforcement
Have you ever been in the situation of humming a song you’ve heard on the radio just once? And how about that song you hate but can’t stop singing? Been there too and there’s a why to it.
According to The Harvard Gazette, “There are certain musical characteristics that make songs more likely to become earworms, such as if the piece is repetitive, if there is a longer duration of certain notes, if intervals between the notes are smaller. Also, songs that trigger some kind of emotional charge, either consciously or not, or songs associated with a particular memory, can often be the ones that get stuck in your head.”
You can turn this in your favour. Our brain likes repetitive things and looks for patterns, so there’s nothing better than listening to catchy music to learn new words, pronunciation, and intonation in Spanish. The more you listen, the more you’ll remember.
You can either opt for listening to the lyrics only or singing along, in which case you will produce the sounds yourself and speed up the process of improving not only your listening skills but also your speaking ones.
Link to a free Spotify playlist of music in Spanish
I’ve created a playlist with music composed by artists from different Spanish-speaking countries, so you can start honing your listening skills wherever you are and whenever you want to.
Learning a language takes time, so I believe the best way to live a long process like this one is by having fun in the meantime. I hope you find this resource to be fun and helpful.
A last thing I’d like to add is that Spotify has a great tool, the lyrics section. This can be of great help throughout the process too: listen and follow the lyrics to better understand what the singer is saying and incorporate word spelling as well.
That’s all for today, you can access the playlist here below. See you in the next post 🖐🤗
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