I love the idea of incorporating songs and music in learning foreign languages. I've also made a few posts and replies on learning languages using songs and music.
Just this week my friends have been teasing me about my studies in Russian language while were in a restaurant. They then played a song translated into Russian and tried to sing it in gibberish. Of course they're just making fun while waiting for our food to be served. Then it dawned on me. It's kinda fun and this could be another addition on how we can use music/songs in learning languages. You can't rely on singing them to learn and understand the correct way to pronounce the words. But you can memorize the words this way as well as the phrases in the language you're learning.
I think other learners would also agree that its useful to memorize the words as you sing them along because that's how most teachers in toddlers would have you do, sing the Alphabet. Problem is the availability of songs that you want to sing, specially if they are in your native language, are not really translated to other languages. So we end up searching for songs of other countries. So for example if you're learning German, you need to search for German songs. This could be hard since you'll first start to memorize the tune before you can actually sing it.
Going back to my friends, they were actually singing "Love is an open door" from the movie Frozen (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9BageU6y9Y). So I quickly searched for similar popular cartoon movie songs in Youtube. I searched for the title of their songs then I added "in Russian" in my search since that's the language I'm learning. It worked. This time I searched Aladdin's A whole new world (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJbMW-CGwGs) which is even better because the subtitles have Russian and English translations. So this made me realize that there's a foreign language translation to almost every cartoon song that I watched. I'm assuming most of us do know these songs because it's either we watch them or we watch them with our kids.
So if you're someone like me who's used to singing songs in the foreign language they're learning to memorize the words and phrases and you want to use a song that you're already familiar with, try the popular cartoon songs, more often than not they have a translation to a lot of languages. Better if you can search a version in Youtube that has subtitles both in English and the foreign language you are learning.
As for my friends, jokes are on them because I ended up singing the chorus of "Love is an open door" in Russian and I'm confident I got the correct words. Just don't ask my if I got the correct tune. :D
