I’m amazed at how popular foreign languages are in the States, especially Japanese and also Korean. A lot of people are also interested in reading the different symbols involved. The trick of course is to make it fun. So to help out I’ve made 2 hip hop and 1 dance track to learn a few of the symbols. The results are looking very good and for teachers it’s a great way to get a sense of how your students feel when they see English phonics. Actually learning a new alphabet yourself really kicks you into gear and let’s you see how useful (and easy if made fun!) phonics can be.

The songs are purposely very fast, so they can survive several listens. At the moment it looks like it takes a dozen listens or so to get a good grasp of each alphabet, for an average new learner. Well, you wouldn’t want to be bored on your first listen, would you? The interesting thing is that Korean has more newer sounds, but the symbols are a lot simpler, whereas Japanese has very few new sounds, but some tricky symbols, so they balance up very well.

As usual: Warning these songs get very annoying very quickly and will be with you all day!