The other day I read a post about learning languages and passive listening.
http://www.fluentin3months.com/passive-learning
Basically, passively listening to anything won’t help you learn it.
While I was in Sri Lanka for a month, I heard an awful lot of Sinhala. Words and phrases that I learned before arriving sometimes stayed in my memory. It helped a lot if I heard them in real conversations and recognized them. And new pieces stuck here and there, but only when I tried to remember them and used them.
Listening is really important on saxophone, but not passive listening. You’ve got to pick the horn and try things out!
Most people on the planet listen to music quite a bit, but most people aren’t musicians. It takes more than intercepting sound waves.
It’s great to enjoy music. Don’t stop doing that.
However, to really learn from music you hear, take what you hear and play it yourself. Bring it into your own music.
If you don’t already, try playing it by ear or transcribing it!
Thanks for the mention! Glad you see how it works in music too. The only way I learned the piano when I was growing up was to sit down and practise! 🙂 Ten million hours of listening to piano wouldn’t have made me a pianist…
.-= Benny the Irish polyglot´s last blog ..Interview in German- and major language realisations =-.
Hey Benny,
Good to hear from you! Maybe if you had transcribed everything you heard….
Hey Neal,
I read that article too; I’m not sure I entirely agree with Benny. Passive listening (to both music and language) is great for developing an intuition of what sounds “right”, in terms of accent and/or style. In other words, passive listening lets you learn music/language, and it’s something you can do to fill up the day in between practicing.
Playing along is still much better, but passive listening can still be useful!
– E
Hey Eldon,
Good call on the importance of listening and getting the nuances. However, I would say that if you’re really listening and figuring out what sounds right, not really ‘passive’ in the case of language.
I’m fairly certain you listen less ‘passively’ than most people 😉
-Neal