When I was in kindergarten our class participated in a riveting performance of “50 Nifty United States” a song about, you guessed it, the 50 states. Part (and by part I mean 75%) of the song entails singing the names of all 50 states in alphabetical order. Now in my late 30s, I’ve been delighting bar patrons for years with my ability to still recite all 50 states, without pause, perfectly.
Music is a great way to learn things. There’s nothing like a catchy tune to make things stick in your mind.
Lirica is an app that takes that idea and applies it to learning a foreign language. The app takes the music of artists like Enrique Iglesias and Elvis Crespo and uses it to help you learn Spanish vocabulary and grammar. Google recently highlighted the app as one of Google Play’s “Best Hidden Gems of 2018.”
Songs within the app and broken down into beginner, intermediate, and expert.
Within each song, you can choose what you’d like to learn. For instance, when I selected Elvis Crepo’s Suavemente I was given the choice of learning Spanish diminutives, adverbs, present tense, or pronominal verbs.
With each lesson, you learn parts of the language, similar to how you might with Duolingo or another language-learning app, but using music. Each lesson includes short games to play where you’re learning what’s actually being said in the song.
You can also just listen to the music with subtitles that show you what’s being said in Spanish or the Spanish with an English translation below it.
You’re probably not going to become fluent with the app, but it is a fun way to learn some new phrases quickly.