During the long history of mankind, a song has always been a kind of technique, helping people to pass on knowledge, wisdom and information from one generation to the next. For the peoples, who did not have a written language, their songs constituted a valuable part of the oral tradition. The messages of the oral tradition can take different forms. For example, they can be popular tales, sayings, ballads, songs or chants. Even today, a song helps preserve the national identity of numerically small peoples, who do not have national writing systems.
Often a song can convey the precise information of human activities. The well-known example of this fact is a work song. There are many types of work songs: farm work songs, industrial folk songs, sea shanties, cowboy songs, African-American work songs, and others. Work songs often convey information about skills that anyone can learn through singing. The songs took their rhythms from the work done and helped people work together.
Why did people use songs to transmit information from generation to generation?
The answer is obvious: people had no alternative technique for transmitting verbal information without altering their text. Only songs can save the integrity of verbal information passing from generation to generation. The chance of a song being randomly changed is very low, because any unintentional alteration to the lyric text violates the rules, according to which a particular song has been written.
What can be considered as the purpose of a song nowadays?
There are different views on the purpose of a song. My point of view is that a song provides the best way to memorize oral information, and a song is a means of encoding information for humans. A song can help us
- memorize oral information,
- keep information for a long time,
- pass the information on to another person.
How can songs help us in learning a foreign language?
Most of the self-learners face the problem: how to memorize and always keep in their memory the active vocabulary of a foreign language, while being in an English-speaking environment. In these harsh conditions, only songs can help the student. Only the songs can be memorized by people and stored in their minds for years, or even their entire lives.
What are the main problems in learning foreign songs?
Well, there are a number of problems that students can encounter. For example, the voice of a singer can be recognized with difficulty. Poor student phonetics can result in difficulties with correct singing. But perhaps the most serious problem is that the letters cannot have a definitive translation. In fact, the translation of letters is almost useless for learning purposes. The learner of a foreign language needs to know the message of the letters and the linguistic means with which the letters were written. In addition, the student needs to know the images, which often form the basis of the letters.
Is there any method of linguistic analysis of foreign poetry or letters?
Until recently, there was no such technique, but today you can enjoy the newly developed technique – the Language Teaching Decomposition (LD) method. The method is the multilevel analysis of foreign letters or poetry. The LD method is aimed at training for the direct perception of foreign letters (without any auxiliary language). For the first time, the application of this method to the Russian language has been presented in the Via Songs to Russian (VStoR) software. The application presents you with the complete information about the message of the Russian letters and the linguistic means with which the letters were written, as well as other useful information.