The Music Method

The music method simply involves listening to Spanish music, getting the lyrics in Spanish, translating them to English, and listening to it over and over again.


There’s an awesome YouTube user who takes the hard work out of this. He goes by the pseudonym escorpio123, and has uploaded LOADS of Spanish music with both Spanish lyrics and their English translation underneath. What’s more, he has assigned a difficulty level to each song, ranging from level 1, which includes the slow, soppy, lovey-dovey power ballads like Noelia, up to Level 5, which includes Reggeaton and Spanish rap music.
Just in case escorpio123 gets shut down by YouTube, he does have a website where his stuff is available for download.
As awesome as escorpio123 is, some of his stuff might not to be your taste. I kinda like it in a strange way, especially Nino Bravo, but if you like something else it’s pretty easy to find. Just Google “Spanish Genre.” For the knuckleheads reading this, replace ‘genre’ with the type of music you want. You’ll find a Wikipedia page usually. I found the rock band Heroes del Silencio this way. Then find the lyrics and use Google translator, supplemented by an online ESP-ENG dictionary (Google isn’t always completely accurate).
I’ve found that the most effective way (for me at least) is to listen to one line at a time. I just skip back over the same line over and over while reading the Spanish lyrics, until I can make out each individual word. Literally I do this 50-100 times. Then I do the same thing, but without looking at the lyrics. Try it. Not so easy now is it? Getting a bit cocky there, weren’t you? We need to be able to comprehend without having the words in front of us, so it does makes sense to practise this way.
The idea is to get to the point where you can understand without translating. At first, you need the English lyrics nearby to recall what each word means, especially for new words or conjugations. But over time you ‘know’ what the word means without having to mentally use English as an intermediary step.
Brutal repetition of single lines will achieve this much more easily than listening to the whole song on repeat, and your are on your way to learn to speak Spanish fluently!
To complete your training regime, use this as well.
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