In my last post, I posted a video of me rapping my first full verse of French.  In accordance with The Mimic Method philosophy, the purpose of this activity is to train the motor memory in my speech organ so that I can produce French sounds at normal speeds.  

Before I could rap in French, however, I needed to familiarize myself with its component sounds, or phonemes.  Every language has its own phonetic menu, or list of possible sounds.  In the case of "Standard French" (you'll hear what I think about the use of the word "standard" later), there are roughly 36 different menus on the item.

This may sound like a lot to digest, until you start to cross off the sounds that already exist in English.  Of the 36 French sounds, 27 already exist in English.  From a learning perspective this makes things much easier.

In all of the courses in The Flow Series, the first unit focuses exclusively on the "Sound System" of the language.  The Sound System Primer contains:
    •    Detailed instructions for articulating each sound of that language's phonetic menu.
    •    A list of all the common "English Speaker Tendencies" and how to avoid them.
    •    Drills for developing the motor memory needed to articulate the most difficult sounds.

For the sake of brevity, however, this post is just going to focus on my personal challenges mastering the basic phonemes of French.

My personal approach to language learning is really quite simple.

1. First, I familiarize myself with the sound and articulation of each of the component sounds (phonemes) of the language.
2. Then, I use Rhythmic Phonetic Training teach myself the lyrics of rap songs to develop my mastery of the Flow of that language and hone my mimicry skills.
3. Next, I immerse myself in the place that speaks the language and learn through mimicry.  

In future videos, I will show you exactly this last step of mimicry actually goes down in practice.  I will also discuss how I went about the first step of familiarizing myself with the component sounds of French.

For now, we'll focus on step 2 - teaching myself how to rap songs without understanding the lyrics.  In this video, I teach myself the song "Soul Pleurer" ("Soul Cry") by the Old School French Rap group from Montreal - Dubmatique.

Welcome to "The Flow Blog"  I started this blog a few months back but put it aside to focus on developing my Flow Series Courses.  I figured no one would want to hear what I had to say about language and learning until I had proven that my ideas were worthwhile.  I mean who would ever believe some crazy guy who talks about the virtues of rapping in foreign languages?

Well as it turns out, quite a few people have found the idea compelling, and a growing number of people are trying out Rhythmic Phonetic Training to learn to sing and rap in Spanish, Portuguese and Mandarin Chinese (French coming soon!).   

But now that people are starting to really feel the Flow of their target languages, I've been getting a lot of emails from students similar to this: 

For my business, I am trying to carve out my own niche in musical accent training, as accent is the most underdeveloped (yet the most crucial) aspect of any language learning program.  So to keep people's attention on what I believe has been ignored for too long, I have remained staunchly silent on the rest of the language-learning process.

But now that I have a decent-sized following of students putting faith in my methods, I feel a duty to complete the entire story.  So I have reinvigorated this blog to explain my language approach in detail, using my current mission to learn French in Montreal, Quebec, Canada as a case study.