I figured no one would want to hear what I had to say about language and learning until I had proven that my ideas were worthwhile. I mean who would ever believe some crazy guy who talks about the virtues of rapping in foreign languages?
As it turns out, quite a few people have found the idea compelling. A growing number of people are trying out my Flow Series courses to learn Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, French and even English!
But now that people are starting to really feel the Flow of their target languages, I’ve been getting a lot of emails from students similar to this:
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“Hey Idahosa, so I can sing and rap a couple songs now which is great! But what now? How do I actually learn the language?”
I am trying to carve out a niche in musical accent training, as accent is the most underdeveloped, yet crucial, aspect of any language learning program.
But now that I have a following of students putting faith in my methods, I feel a duty to complete the entire story. So I want to explain my approach using my mission to learn French in Montreal, Quebec, Canada as a case study.
Why it’s the “Mimic” Method
For those of you unfamiliar with my philosophy, I base it on one simple principle: Language is acquired through mimicry.
Notice how the name of my business is not Rap Linguistica or The Sing-Songy Method but rather The Mimic Method.
This is sequence of events:
- Language is acquired through mimicry.
- Mimicking a foreign language requires perceiving and producing the sound patterns of that language.
- The easiest, most fun way to train is to sing and rap songs in that language with a perfect accent.
So you don’t learn language through rapping – you learn it through mimicking. And singing and Rapping is just a powerful way to hone your skills in Mimicry.
If you put in the effort to train your Flow, you will be extremely surprised at how naturally the rest of the process occurs.
Mimicking French in Montreal
My current language mission is to learn French in Montreal, Quebec (Canada).
Montreal has a huge immigrant population, so it’s great to expose myself to a variety of French accents. I can mingle with people of North African, West African, European, Caribbean, and even Asian origins.
In addition, Quebec is known for having a French dialect quite different from those of the rest of the world. It’s so different that fluent French speakers from other parts of the world often find it unintelligible when they first arrive.
So which accent will I learn? Once again, my goal is to be adaptive.
Whenever people ask me “Idahosa, what’s the best accent to learn for [insert language]?” I always respond the same:
“The ‘best’ accent to mimic is that of the person
you happen to be listening to at that moment.”
I am critical against anyone who labels any accent/dialect/version of a language as “incorrect”, “Bad” or “Poor.” The phonetic and grammatical rules of ANY language will always be arbitrary.
Behind the principle of mimicry lies another basic truth.
That is that oral language in its most basic sense is people communicating with one another through a common set of sound-meaning conventions.
My goal is never to speak a more perfect French or a more perfect Mandarin.
My goal is always to become a more perfect communicator.
I chose Montreal as the city to learn French (over the more common choice of Paris) because I determined it would offer more opportunities for me to achieve this goal.
PS. You can see some of the results of my efforts in this post here.
À la prochaine!
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