Tag Archives: singandstudy

Alexander Parij (SingAndStudy) – Interview (Part 2)

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Here you have the final part of my interview with Alexander Parij from SingAndStudy. You can read the first part here, of course.

PART II

MUSIC & YOU

Q:When did you become interested in music? What was the first album or single you ever purchased?

A: I did not have a lot of pocket money to buy CDs, so I mainly listened to the radio.
The first album I purchased was the soundtrack of Spawn when I was teenager.

Q:Are you in a band yourself, or have you been in a band in the past? Is there a clip on YouTube or elsewhere we could watch?

A:Not really.

Q:Musical likes and dislikes? Favorite artists?

A: My music tastes change a lot. I think it progressed from heavy metal to psy-trance and then to something more mellow. Right now I listen a lot to Eduard Artemyev (one of the founders of Soviet electronic music), Pink Floyd and Jimmy Hendrix. Continue reading →

SingAndStudy – Learn A Language By Listening To Songs And Playing Word Games

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SingAndStudy

Name: Sing And Study
URL: http://www.singandstudy.com

For students of foreign languages, songs are one of the perfect frameworks for capturing new vocabulary. The reasons are obvious: songs lasts only a couple of minutes, and some sections repeat themselves over and over. And you have a melody to begin with – a melody that can dote whole segments of the composition with instant catchiness, if not the whole song.

I already reviewed one site for learning languages using videos, but this one is a bit different. Named Sing And Study, it stands as a (paid) Adobe application that you download and launch from your desktop. This application will let you create word games with these videos that you like. That is, you will define which words are missing from the lyrics as the song is playing. This has the immediate advantage of letting you set the difficulty level as specifically as you want. A song can be suited to just anybody, since you will determine what will be removed from where.

For instance, you could take “Like A Rolling Stone” and make filling the gaps something easy:

You never _____ around to see the frowns on the jugglers and the clowns
When they all come down and did _____ for you
You never _____ that it ain’t no good
You shouldn’t let other people get your kicks for you
You used to _____ on the chrome horse with your diplomat
Who carried on his shoulder a Siamese cat
Ain’t it _____ when you discover that
He really wasn’t where it’s at
After he took from you everything he could steal Continue reading →