Larry M. Coleman

An ear can’t hold a pen, so why would we bother to train it? Because the eye has an ear of its own.

Think of the nursery rhymes you learned, possibly before you were even old enough to read. They helped lay down the pathways in your brain of what sounds good. Pick your favorite and sing it to yourself a few times, thinking about the language. It’s rarely sophisticated, but something about it feels right.

This even works if the song isn’t in your native language. Although I went to an as-average-as-it-gets public school in Ohio, we learned the French song “Alouette, Gentille Alouette” in music class. I was in elementary school, so I wasn’t exactly at the age where I critically analyzed musicological pedagogy during recess (I don’t even do that during recess now), but I assume it was that by removing the element of comprehension from the lyrics, we were forced to concentrate on the sounds.

Now let’s up this a bit by listening to a different song in French. This one is definitely not a nursery rhyme; it’s a clever song written by Serge Gainsbourg, one of the most famous French singer-songwriters in history, and sung almost 50 years later by a French singer who was pretty famous herself. It’s okay if you don’t speak French—in fact, this works a little better if you don’t. Give it a listen or two or several, then keep reading.

It has a very distinct sound to it, doesn’t it? Even without understanding the words, you can feel how they belong together. This is because Gainsbourg is having fun by doing something hard: he’s writing in a playful French style called Javanais without actually using its convention while at the same time constraining his subject to focus on punning on a form of dance also called Javanaise.

What he’s writing in, Javanais, is a language game. We’ve all done them in English as children when we speak Pig Latin. We lop off the first letter, add an “ay” to it, then glue it to the end: igpay atinlay for pig latin. Javanais instead adds an “av” into the middle of words according to its own rules. (Javanais is a little simpler, but there is also a French language game that is closer to English’s Pig Latin called louchébem.)

What’s impressive about the song is that Gainsbourg isn’t actually converting the words: he’s putting together words that already sound like they’re the products of the game, but they’re normal words. Try writing a song in English that sounds like Pig Latin but by using only regular words. To make it flow and feel like Pig Latin is harder than you’d think.

It’s the thinking that’s important here. Listening to the sounds of a language you don’t speak forces you to think about the sounds in a different way. But this is the way you should be thinking about them even when you’re reading.

This is also why we read old poetry in school: not to memorize dead guys’ words, but to learn how to hear writing. (It’s old poetry because most modern poetry has lost the thread of what it tries to weave itself from.) If you read all of Keats, Frost, and Neruda—one lyrically Irish; one unadorned but sentimentally American; one lusciously, sensually Chilean; and all dead—you will have more ability to “sight read” the music of the written word than an entire bachelor’s degree would give you and in half the time.

This song isn’t the only one you can use to train your ear to write better; it’s just one in which the theme stands strongly out. You can find your own if you’re adventurous enough to put in the effort.

Next week, we’ll talk about another song by Alizée, one which will help you “hear” the sound of structure instead of just words. Leave a comment if you have a favorite song already!