Listen and Learn: The Top-Tier List Of Songs To Learn English To
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If you’re anything like us, you love music. Whether it’s singing - or rather, screaming - to your favourite jams, holding a full-blown 3-hour concert in your shower or just crying a river to the heart-wrenching lyrics, songs definitely play a major role in our life.
Besides, we find that songs are also a fun and easy way to learn English. In fact, with good lyrics, you may discover that learning English through songs works incredibly well for you!
In this article, we share our top-tier songs that help to learn English and will get your inner singer pumped up!
All Too Well (10 minute version) by Taylor Swift
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Taylor Swift’s poetic lyrics that incorporate various rhetorical devices in ‘All Too Well’ make this a great song to learn English. Rhetorical devices are a set of linguistic tools used in sentences to evoke a particular reaction from an audience. Some of the most famous ones include alliteration, repetition, similes, metaphors, imagery, and hyperbole.
Let’s take a look at some of the rhetorical devices found in ‘All Too Well’:
Imagery: ‘Your cheeks were turning red’
Metaphor: ‘I'm a crumpled-up piece of paper lying here’
Simile: ‘Autumn leaves falling down like pieces into place’
Oxymoron: ‘And I might be okay but I'm not fine at all’
Alliteration: ‘So casually cruel…, From when your Brooklyn broke…, ran the red…’
Repetition: ‘Cause I remember it all, all, all…’
Someone Like You by Adele
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The advanced idioms such as ‘out of the blue’ and ‘time of our lives’, as well as the phrases ‘glory days’, ‘summer haze’, and ‘bittersweet’, will give you plenty of ideas for future exams and writing projects. If you’re looking for a list of excellent idioms, take a look at our previous post here.
Paired with Adele’s British accent and slow but clear pronunciation, you have found the gem of a song to learn English. ‘Someone Like You’ proves that a song that's out of your vocal range doesn’t have to be out of your vocab range!
Deja Vu by Olivia Rodrigo
The title alone already teaches you something new! Besides the definition of the title, the shift from past to present tense and vice versa throughout ‘Deja Vu’ tackles one’s ability to keep up with different tenses, proving to be a great song to learn English grammar.
Here’s an excerpt of the chorus, with the different tenses bolded:
So when you gonna tell (present) her
That we did (past) that, too?
She thinks (present) it's special
But it's all reused (past)
That was (past) our place, I found (past) it first
I made (past) the jokes you tell (present) to her when she's (present) with you
Sign of The Times by Harry Styles
Besides the already-educational song title, what makes this song great for learning English is the use of everyday words like ‘bullets’, ‘cry’ and ‘final show’ in different contexts outside their literal meaning. Listeners learn the skill of analysing and reading between the lines, making it a good stepping stone towards advanced English and even poetry.
Thinking Out Loud by Ed Sheeran
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The song’s slow pace and repetitive chorus help English learners focus more on their pronunciation and simultaneously improve their vocabulary. Not to mention, it is one of the songs with light and direct messages, making its context relatively easier to understand. Overall, ‘Thinking Out Loud’ would be perfect for beginners wanting to learn English through songs.
See You Again (Clean) by Wiz Khalifa ft. Charlie Puth
Wiz Khalifa’s and Puth’s infamous ballad is the only song in our list that has rap incorporated, making it not only a great song to learn English BUT to practise English listening skills as well. Furthermore, the song has common abbreviations and slang that listeners can learn, such as ‘bout, ‘gon and vibe.
Fool’s Gold by One Direction
Although they’re no longer one, the heartthrob boy band from the UK has definitely directed us towards better English! ‘Fool’s Gold’ is an exquisite song to learn English for many reasons, including the poem-like repetition, choice of simple yet challenging words, and, more importantly, the unique lyric that caters to all levels of English learners,
Depending on your level, you would learn:
Beginner: Vocabulary: fool’s gold, admit, distraction, rays, reckless, constant, shining
Intermediate: Rhetorical devices: simile, metaphor, imagery, idiom
Advanced: Analysing song context and meaning; rhyming; harder rhetorical device; literature
Killer Queen by 5 Seconds of Summer
Originally sung by the 1970’s band Queen, those taking on this song will face a sea of random and rarely-heard words, alongside unusual-looking sentences, making ‘Killer Queen’ the most challenging song on this list. But don’t fret; once you’ve mastered this song, you’ll 100% be a killer queen, or king even, at English vocabulary and comprehension.
Here’s the first verse of the song, with interesting words to look out for:
She keeps her Moët et Chandon
In her pretty cabinet
"Let them eat cake, " she says
Just like Marie Antoinette
A built-in remedy
For Khrushchev and Kennedy
At anytime an invitation
You can't decline