It was a tough morning.
One of the hidden challenges of marriage is when a husband and wife come from different cultures, speak different native languages, and are forced to communicate in a second language. Oddly enough, I think it is great for our relationship.
People sometimes ask why Ash and I rarely have huge arguments. My theory is simple: try having a serious fight in your second language. Even if you have spoken it for years, it is exhausting. You have to think and translate at the same time. After five minutes, most of your desire to argue has already disappeared. For me, speaking a second language automatically puts my brain into “problem-solving mode” rather than “emotional-expression mode.” So instead of fighting, we usually move directly to solving the problem.
This morning, however, Ash decided to take revenge for all the Chinese lessons I have given him by teaching me Malayalam again.
Chinese and Malayalam are both challenging languages if your linguistic background is mainly Western European languages. There is simply no easy shortcut. Yet I have noticed something interesting: people with strong musical abilities often learn pronunciation much faster.
Chinese has four tones. Ash often struggles to reproduce the tones correctly when he follows Duolingo, but when he listens to me and imitates my pronunciation, he gets them right about 95% of the time. His musical ear helps tremendously.
This morning we were working on two different “L” sounds. First, I could not even hear the difference between them. The sounds simply do not exist in Mandarin, and they do not really exist in English either. The first challenge in learning any new sound is that your brain does not recognize it as meaningful.
Then Ash demonstrated how to make the sound: “Put your tongue on the roof of your mouth, flatten it out, and then move it quickly.”
I followed the instructions. My tongue moved exactly where he told me to put it. According to Ash, however, the resulting sound was “not even close.” At that point, I gave up.
This, by the way, is exactly the difference between people with exceptional musical ears and the rest of us. They hear tiny differences that most people cannot detect. Sometimes they can be unbelievably demanding listeners.
Ninety-nine percent of humanity cannot tell the difference. Please just let me go.
But that is also why great musicians are so valuable. Without that one percent of people who can hear the difference, none of us would know how far we are from perfection—even if those people can occasionally be a little mean about it!
Our battle with the Malayalam L’s—and the three different R’s—will continue.
Yet the entire experience made me think about how the human brain processes sound, whether in language or music.
When I was in elementary school, I could not match pitch. I was actually told not to sing. It got better when I entered into middle school when I started to listen to classical music. Thankst to Beehoven whose music raised my passion for music and I joined the school choir and church choir at that time.
Matching pitch is surprisingly similar to learning pronunciation in a new language. Before you can reproduce a sound, your brain first has to become familiar with it.
When a sound does not exist in your native language, your brain treats it as strange. It takes time and repeated exposure before your auditory system learns to distinguish it reliably.
That is why listening is so important.
The best way to improve musical hearing is to listen more. The best way to learn a language is to immerse yourself in it. The more exposure your brain has, the more opportunities it gets to build accurate sound categories.
After hearing comes production. Singing, in many ways, is like speaking a new language. Once your brain recognizes the sound, it must train the muscles to reproduce it. In my case, the Malayalam “L” requires tongue movements that my tongue seems completely unwilling to perform. I am convinced Ash’s tongue is at least an inch longer than mine.
Perhaps if I practice saying ulli every day, my tongue will eventually grow longer.
Then comes a third challenge: memory. Learning pitch relationships in music is a little like learning vocabulary in a new language. It takes time to build a library of sounds in your brain. But both music and language involve more than simply remembering sounds.
Reading solfège is not so different from reading Chinese characters. In both cases, you are connecting a visual symbol to a sound stored in memory. The task is not merely remembering; it is linking a writing system to a pronunciation system.
This is also why singing is such a natural entrance into music. The human voice is often easier to match than the pitch of a piano or another instrument. Just as our native language is the first sound system we learn, the human voice is often the most intuitive musical instrument we encounter.
For the record, I promised Ash that I would not post the video of him forcing me to pronounce Malayalam words on Facebook.
So instead, I wrote this article to remember this particularly tough morning. I think I got the better deal.