by Alexius Tan

Created on: June 02, 2008

Listening to CDs in the car can help u in the familiarizing the pace, tones, rhythms, correct pauses and pronunciations in learning a language.

While driving, it is unlikely for you to give full attention in driving and learning at the same time. It should be noted that while a scenario is given on the CD, you tend to have an image of the scenario in your mind.

This somehow causes distraction. While driving, you know paying more attention on driving is the right option. Hence it is difficult for one to think about the scenario proposed by the CD recording.

1 General pronunciation rules
However, you are familiarized by the way the language users speak. You become aware of the general pronunciations; example, you would realize there are no "V" sounds in Korean, Mandarin Chinese and Japanese, or there is only "N" end-consonant for Japanese and only "N" and "Ng" end-consonants for Mandarin Chinese.

2 Correct pauses and stresses.
You would also discover certain ways syllables are grouped, so that words are not broken up. Example: You would realize Koreans tend to end their spoken sentences with "sum-nida", "se-yo" and etc where these endings are somewhat fixed, when reading them, you know you should speak like the native speaker, read them in a string, not breaking them and stressing them at incorrect positions.

3 Tones
This is true for learning tonal languages like Chinese, Thai and Vietnamese.
Listening to how native speakers speak will make you realize that certain consecutive tones are not possible and would cause a tone-change.

For example in reading the numbers 5-5-5-5 in Mandarin Chinese, if following the word-by-word pronunciation, it would sound wu3-wu3-wu3-wu3 (where 3 denotes the third tone in Mandarin Chinese), however in colloquial Mandarin Chinese, it will be read as wu2-wu3-wu2-wu3, so that there is a variation of tone to ease* pronunciation (*It is difficult to read 2 consecutive third tone together, hence in Mandarin Chinese, ALL words with 2 consecutive third tones will be changed in such a way that the preceding third tone will drop to the second tone)

4 New pronunciations
We are aware that there are pronunciations that are alien to us, for example the "ng" sound in "Ngong" for Thai, "ngh" sound in "Nghe" for Vietnamese and the vowel for "Xu" in Mandarin Chinese are some of the sounds that are never used in English. While listening to the CD in the car, the driver can mimic these sounds while driving.

In conclusion, there is a limit to what you can learn in listening to a CD in the car. Though you cannot effectively learn useful conversations while driving, you do gain useful prerequisites and skills about the language, which pave the way for future advanced foreign language learning.

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