News: Laying the Foundation pt.1

So you know what language you want to learn

You've got your language picked out and you're ready to dive in, so let's move on to the first step in building a language foundation:

Finding Media: Beginners (Pronunciation)

This foundation revolves around media for a few core reasons. First off, media is fluid and ever-changing like the language is. Secondly, because media involves social issues and events, it conveys the culture like nothing else can. Lastly, with the advent of the internet, media is everywhere and free! Honestly though, the real reason I focus on media so much is because it's fun and interesting.

Step 1 Hunting for music, the YouTube way

YouTube will most likely be your bread and butter for finding interesting media for pronunciation. So, head over to YouTube and grab a great song in your target language that you love. You can also buy CDs or DVDs in your target language, but YouTube can have you listening to amazing songs in no time.

Step 2 Getting to understand the pronunciation through lyrics

I'm sure you have impeccable hearing, and believe you are pronouncing everything your favorite singer is singing perfectly. Well, you're not. And you're going to have to get some lyrics for that song you are listening to, to be able to.

Luckily, I've found that in every language that I've come across, you can normally copy and paste the name of the song into Google and put "lyrics" at the end in English and be good to go. I've even done this with Russian songs using Cyrillic. So, get out there and find those lyrics and sing along to them!

Tips

• It's normally nice to have an open mind to musical types, because some languages excel in certain types of music more than others. Also, folk music is vastly different from culture to culture. 
• When learning songs with a different phonetic system than the roman one, you will want to get transcriptions of them in their romanized versions as well. Google translate will do this with some languages. 
• If you have any questions concerning lyrics in other languages please post in this thread on the forum and I will include how to go about finding music or lyrics in that language.

Remember to go to the forums and request what language you would like me to do a video on! I will be creating a video for each of these steps.