Tamara Marie is a certified language coach who uses songs to teach language. She has developed a course called Spanish Con Salsa, which teaches Spanish through interactive lessons and uses Spanish songs to aid in retention of the learned material. In this episode, she discusses how she came to find music as an effective tool for learning languages, as well as how to best use music to learn more in-depth about a language.

Top three takeaways:

1. Using music to aid in learning a language can also expose the learner to the culture, dialect, and various accents a language is spoken in, and can teach a language beyond merely the grammar that is taught in a school setting.
2. One should take a targeted approach when learning language from songs. This involves sitting down with song for a while, taking it section by section, identifying unknown words, and slowing down the song to better understand them. The sleep process consolidates memory, so take breaks and don’t try to cram all in one session. When listening to the song later, you will notice and recognize a lot more of vocabulary and speech patterns of native speakers.
3. When learning a language, it is important to be aware of the region you live in and how native speakers within that region tend to speak and enunciate words based on where they come from. For example, when learning Spanish, people who live in the southwest US would be better off learning the Mexican accent.