Idahosa Ness

Watch Me Rap My First Full Verse of French Rap – Soul Pleurer

June 19, 2012 By Idahosa Leave a Comment

In this video, I teach myself the song “Soul Pleurer” (“Soul Cry”) by the Old School French Rap group from Montreal – Dubmatique.

My personal approach to language learning is really quite simple.

I familiarize myself with the component sounds (phonemes) of the language.
I use Rhythmic Phonetic Training to teach myself the lyrics of rap songs to hone my mimicry skills.
I immerse myself in 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.

The Montreal Mission – The Real Reason I’m Learning French Through Rap

June 19, 2012 By Idahosa Leave a Comment

the montreal skyline

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?

As it turns out, quite a few people have found the idea compelling. A growing number of people are trying out my Flow Series courses to learn Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, French and even English!

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:

2 Ways the Written Word is a Language-Learner’s Worst Enemy

February 14, 2012 By Idahosa Leave a Comment

Screen Shot 2016-06-10 at 9.50.04 PM

Whenever I meet someone for the first time and we get to the part where we exchange names, I always follow the same script:

Me: Hi, my name is EE…DOW…SAH……ee-DOW-ssah
Person: “ee-DOW-ssah?”
Me: Exactly
Person: Interesting name. How do you spell that?”
Me: Don’t worry about it; it will only confuse you.

How I Learned to Rap in Spanish

February 8, 2012 By Idahosa Leave a Comment

This is my first foreign language!

I’m putting this video up mainly for two reasons:

To show that one can indeed rap in a foreign language
To show how memorizing song and rap lyrics is infinitely more fun than memorizing flash cards and conjugation charts.

Aside from being more fun than these more “traditional” (my euphemism for “ineffective”) ways of studying language, these activities are superior for many other reason, including but not limited to…

Get to know your Speech Organ

February 1, 2012 By Idahosa Leave a Comment

In The Mimic Method, you study foreign language just as you would study a musical instrument.

For most musical instruments, you create sound through motor movements of the hand and fingers. For language, you are creating sound through precise motor movements of the articulators in your speech organ.

People tend to mystify language because all the motor movement is hidden inside of your mouth. So the only people who have any idea what’s going on in our mouths when we speak are the few people like myself who study linguistics and phonetics.

Language learners very rarely study phonetics.

How to Play the Pandeiro

December 2, 2011 By Idahosa Leave a Comment

The important thing to remember when learning Pandeiro or any other new coordinated physical movement is patience.

It will ALWAYS feel awkward at the start of the learning curve. This discourages many people right away from learning any new instruments or languages.

They see how effortlessly other people can do it, they feel how awkward it is for them to do it, and they think, “I must not have it in me.” This is just a wrong assumption to make..