A musician's perspective on language learning

Being a musician requires attentiveness and other skills that transpose well to language learning

photo credit: Alan Levine <https://flic.kr/p/GE5B2>

When I first began to work with computing technology—I needed a database to manage a combination of bibliographical and encoded musical information—I became acquainted with two consultants at my employer’s computing centre, one of whom was a musician. It was in this context that I first heard the assertion that “musicians make good programmers,” and indeed I came to understand over the years that this was something of a stereotype, at least in the years before ca. 2000.

Being a musician myself I was intrigued by the concept, and in fact became somewhat immersed in development of the technical infrastructure that my project required. At a certain point I began to articulate an explanation of why musicians might take naturally to computer programming:

Musicians, by practicing, are accustomed to working alone, relentlessly performing repetitive tasks, seeking to create coherence and meaning across non-verbal micro- and macro-structures, striving for perfection.

In other words, we acquire technical mastery by breaking things down musically into their smallest logical components, repeating and refining these until they become fluent, then joining them with what precedes or follows to shape meaningful phrases, ultimately to build tension, expectation, resolution, and a sense of overall meaning and wholeness.

One of the values I see to musical training is that one learns, through practicing techniques and skills, an approach that transposes well to learning and understanding things in both quantitative and verbal arts, such as mathematics and language. It also simply develops the ability to sustain attention for long periods of time.

Language learning seems to me to have a particular kinship with music insofar as it requires listening to build understanding, as well as to enable the ability to create or recreate sounds; it requires sensitivity to the nuances of the temporal flow of sound—rhythm and meter—to shape comprehensible phrases and sentences; and it strives for the ability to detect and mimic the melodic shape of spoken language—the rise and fall of pitch in spoken language that lends it intellectual or emotional expression.

Indeed I have always been fascinated with language acquisition and actively transpose approaches from musical learning and practice to language learning.

How does this work?

In effect, I’ve adopted an approach to learning languages—currently focusing on improving my fluency in French—that looks very much like how a musician approaches mastery of their instrument or a piece of music. A key part of this is a daily practice routine. I spend a part of almost every day in language study—sometimes no more than ten minutes if circumstances demand, but often an hour or more. While I might begin a musical practice session with exercises to limber up the muscles used while playing—scales, arpeggios, other études—I often start my language learning simply by reading aloud from the French newspapers I subscribe to. There might be new vocabulary, or a turn of phrase I have to linger on to fully discern its meaning, and these can interrupt the flow—if I am not understanding something’s meaning, I cannot read aloud in a meaningful way either. So I’ll pause, acquire understanding, then repeat so that the spoken language feels natural. I might also then make notes about vocabulary or word usage for future study.

Frequently these days the newspaper offers audio versions of its articles, sometimes read by the author. There will be times when I listen to these as well. And on other days I will also record myself reading these same pieces aloud, then listen and compare (I’ve a basic recording setup I use to create voiceovers for my Substack essays). Again, this feels much like the experience of learning to perform a piece of music, recording it, then reviewing the recording—you always hear things differently during playback, and frequently things just don’t sound the way you thought. Sometimes it is quite painful, sometimes rewarding. I think of this as my cobbled-together “language lab” experience.

Some language teachers frown on the old tradition of studying vocabulary lists, but it’s still part of my practice routine. Over the course of time my lists consist less of individual words than idioms, expressions and common phrases, which I find more challenging to master. It’s in this context that I find the old music practice techniques kick in. Let’s say, for example, I’m trying to master an idiom, like “être au ras des pâquerettes” (literally, “to be at the level of the daisies,” i.e., to be at a low intellectual level). I’d first take “être au ras de” (which might be used by itself in some other context), then join it up with “des pâquerettes” to build the idiom—and then someday I’ll be able to reel it off spontaneously, to everyone’s astonishment (“Il reste toujours au ras des pâquerettes!”).

Or let’s take a phrase like “en être encore à ses balbutiements” (to still be in its beginning stages or infancy). I’d break it down in “en être encore” and “à ses balbutiements,” then put it together, finally building (as spontaneously as possible) new sentences that use the expression, such as “Mes efforts pour apprendre le français en sont encore à leurs balbutiements.”

So does it work? I’ll only say that when I was in my twenties and learning German things took hold in memory much more easily, and it helped to have a year in Germany to drive it home. When I was learning Swedish in my thirties, in the U.S., the language lab was a godsend, and the closest thing available to hearing Swedish spoken naturally by Swedish people—it was an enormous help to be able to listen to native speakers and to hear myself trying to imitate them. Now, decades later, living in France, things seep into the consciousness and deep memory more reluctantly, but in the course of time I see steady progress. There is one other big difference: the muscles of the speech organs are more reluctant these days, set in their ways from years of speaking primarily English. I benefit from having learned some French at a very young age, but I could probably pronounce French better at age four than I do now.

My humble opinion: learn to play music and to speak another language at an early age, and you’re likely to develop learning and listening skills that will last long into the future, in language acquisition but in many other contexts as well.