My name is Heather, and I’m a life-long learner and lover of languages. I’ve taught French and Spanish and worked in the translation industry both as a linguist and a localization engineer. I have always thought that music is a powerful learning tool and I use music both in my own learning and in teaching my students. I created this site to make music available as a learning tool for others. I basically created the tool I would have loved to have had when I was learning.

My Own Learning Style

I am extremely analytical and a visual learner. I have to see a word written to be able to learn it, or at least have enough understanding of the language to be able to envision how the word would be written. I actually enjoy doing grammar exercises and have an entire shelf of grammar books and dictionaries in various languages. I like to get into the nitty-gritty of the languages I’m learning. I don’t just want to know what a phrase means, I also want to understand what each individual word within the phrase means on its own. I want to understand why this word is lenited or that word is in this case or tense as well as each word’s function in the sentence or phrase as a whole.

When I learn a language I use books, tv shows and music in addition to more traditional resources. I try to basically immerse myself in the languages I’m learning as much as I possibly can without being able to live in a country where the language is spoken. I am usually very impatient to reach a level where I can read and listen, and start as soon as possible with things like children’s books. Lyrical Language is simply me making available to others the type of things I would create for myself in my own learning.

My own language journey

Formal Education

My personal language journey started when I was quite young. Despite the fact that I went to a public school in the US, I had the good fortune of beginning to study French in elementary school. As I enjoyed French greatly, I continued to study it throughout junior high and high school. I also had the good fortune of having an outstanding high school French teacher. We didn’t have a textbook; rather, my teacher would create her own grammar explanations and exercises. But best of all, she used books, songs and films to teach us the language using real-world resources. We sang many songs from artists such as La Compagnie Créole, Roche Vosine and Téléphone. This is where I first developed my love of foreign music and my appreciation for its value as a learning tool.

When I moved on to the university I started out as a Music Education major with a minor in French, but paralyzing performance anxiety combined with the senior recital requirement caused me to change direction. I ended up making French Education my major and relegating music to my minor. As part of my degree, I spent a semester studying in France. Part of my time in France was spent with a warm, wonderful host family, with whom I am still in touch to this day.

A Linguaphile is Born

Shortly after earning my degree, I considered returning to the university to add a Spanish endorsement to my teaching certificate, as more US students study Spanish than French. So in preparation, I spent six months teaching myself enough Spanish to skip directly into 300 and 400-level classes. Though ultimately I didn’t end up returning to school, I found that I enjoyed Spanish almost as much as French and continued to study and improve my Spanish on my own. I think it was at this point that I began to realize that I just enjoy the process of learning languages. Throughout the next few years, I began to study several other languages, though each time I ran out of motivation before ever reaching any kind of fluency. 

Professional Life

I soon began a career as a linguist and localization engineer, where I found the things I had learned about various languages to be quite helpful in performing my job. As language knowledge was so helpful in my position there were even short periods of time when my company paid for my language learning, first in Arabic and then in Japanese. Though once the support from my company stopped, once again, I didn’t have the motivation to continue learning on my own.

Learning Begins Again in Earnest

In January of 2018 my grandfather, who was of Irish descent, passed away. He was always extremely proud of his Irish heritage, and his passing with quite difficult for me. To help me process everything I was feeling, I decided I needed a way to honor his memory. Though he never spoke Irish, with my love of languages I decided that studying Irish would be my own personal way to do so. It would also help me to connect with his heritage. Having such a personal reason for learning helped to keep me motivated, even when my learning didn’t progress as quickly as I would have liked.

It was also around this time that I began studying German for a second time. I found that I was able to progress much more quickly with German than Irish. That coupled with all the great resources I was able to find online this time around helped to keep me motivated to continue learning through the difficult periods.

Lyrical Language is born

Though I had had the idea to create a site dedicated to using music to learn a language brewing in the back of my mind for quite some time, I just never had the time or motivation to create it. But in March of 2020, my life changed drastically. As did much of the world, I found myself under a Covid 19 lockdown. School had gone online, and I needed to be home with my daughter. But rather than join the Tiger King craze, I decided to use that forced time at home to make my idea into reality. After taking a couple of months to build the site and create a process, Lyrical Language launched in May. I originally planned to provide resources for learning French, Spanish and Irish, and the site launched with one song in each. I discovered very quickly, however, that my low level of Irish made analyzing the Irish songs like wading through knee-deep mud, and decided to focus solely on my strongest languages, French and Spanish. As the site was nearing its one-year anniversary I added German. I still hope to add Irish one day.