Can You Learn Korean from Kpop?

If you're asking this question, then at least you may have some interest in learning Korean, which is a great start, or maybe you're just interesting in finding an answer to the question. Hopefully I will be able to answer both of these.  If you're new to my blog or language learning, it may be worth reading through these three articles when you have finish this post:

• Korean Fluency Path
• Should You Learn Korean?
• Realistically How Long Does it Take to Learn a Language?

There are a few glaringly obvious advantages and disadvantages to using Kpop and by extension music to learn a language. Advantages such as repetitive language, easy to listen repeatedly, enjoyable to listen to. Sadly a lot of these advantages are negated by any lack of effort to search the meaning of the words or effort to learn the language.

In my article 'The Role of Listening in Language Learning', I explain how listening plays two roles. The first to get sounds into your head regardless of whether you know the meaning or not and the second to act as a review to strengthen your memory of words you already know.

We all have movie lines stuck in our head, even ones from childhood. It's very common for humans to repetitively read, watch or listen to content they find enjoyable. There is a sense of comfort, especially for children, who you will find will want to watch the same movie every night or want you to read them the same story over and over.

Using Audio Description for Language Learning

You may have noticed while changing the language or subtitles on netflix, an option called 'audio description' or even on television programmes, a symbol that says AD which represents that audio description is available. Generally audio description will only be available in the language the TV show was produced in although there may be some exceptions.

The intended use of audio description is to allow blind or visually impaired individuals to understand more of what is happening during the silent and action oriented parts of a show or movie. When this setting is active, a narrator will describe the actions that are taking place, such as 'man with scruffy hair walks down a long corridor.'

Audio description logo on UK television

The Role of Listening in Language Learning

Being one our main methods of receiving information being able to correctly hear and understand what other speakers are saying is invaluable to human survival. As a language learner, the majority of your time with your target language will likely be through the audio component and if your aim is to have meaningful conversations with natives and other speakers, then you will want to be as good as you can be.

Our listening ability is affected by many factors that we can improve to make listening easier, yet in the end we still need to expose ourselves to thousands of hours. Throughout or time learning a new language the experience of listening will change drastically from sentences sounding like incoherent noise to having instant understanding and even predicted the next noise that is about to come out of someones mouth. 

The time taken to go through these stages is highly dependent on the languages you know and the sounds it uses. I am also highly convinced some languages due to phonology take longer to be able to distinguish sounds, languages ending in mostly vowel sounds such as Italian and Japanese make it a bit easier to tell where word boundaries are. 

There are other variables such as information speed, information density and total number of sounds. Although I could not find any studies based on whether certain languages are objectively harder to hear over others so if you come across such please let me know.

It is highly recommended that you spend a lot of time listening to your target language, just to increase your hours spent with the language. It's very easy to spend a lot of your day listening even if you consider yourself a 'very busy' person, unless you constantly have to talk to someone or be spoke to then you can fit some time in to listen.