When Mozart was a kid, his young mind was bathed in music – it is all he heard around him. His dad didn’t say, “Hey, Wolfgang, this is an eighth note, and this is a half rest. We’ll do some cool music theory tomorrow morning. And check out this treble clef over here. I bet you’d like to learn how to draw one of those bad boys! Cool, huh! And once you learn all this stuff, in about five years, I am going to let you actually hear some music by Bach and Buxtehude and Palestrina, and you can see how all this information that we are learning today fits together and maybe one day if you study hard enough you can play some music of your own but first you have to listen to me talk about music and study theory because that’s the main thing!”
We don’t learn languages by putting off our listening to them. We don’t learn languages by studying bits and pieces of them in written form. We don’t even learn languages by hearing snippets of them in aural form! We learn them by continuously hearing them and understanding them in a relaxed way on a daily basis. We learn them by listening to their music first, and the work is done effortlessly by us, with virtually no involvement of our conscious minds as the work is done for us by our deeper minds – all we have to do is listen for meaning and it all takes care of itself as if by magic.
If some day we decide to major in music, we can then study tonal systems and diminished sevenths and all that stuff. Can’t we just enjoy the music that language is first and break it into pieces later, once we understand what it is? To learn a language, we must construct it by listening to it; we cannot learn a language by deconstructing it.