Learning a Language Through What You Love
On beauty, longing, and the old way into a classical tongue: starting from a poem or a song you love.
17 Oct 2026
Talks and interviews
- Aḥmad Ḥawīlī sings Ibn al-Fāriḍ, «هو الحب» (music by Ziyād Saḥḥāb) ↗
Aḥmad Ḥawīlī (YouTube)
Texts and listening
- Ibn al-Fāriḍ, «هو الحب», Dīwān (Cairo, 1872), p. 108, scan ↗
- Plato, Symposium 210a–211c (Perseus) ↗
- Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ (the Brethren of Purity), Rasāʾil, Epistle 1, ed. al-Ziriklī (Cairo, 1928)
- Read the whole of the poem with the Arabic, the roots of each word and a translation on Mashraba ↗
Research the essay draws on
- R. C. Gardner and W. E. Lambert, “Motivational variables in second-language acquisition,” Canadian Journal of Psychology 13 (1959) ↗
- Z. Dörnyei, “The L2 Motivational Self System” (2009) ↗
- S. Hidi and K. A. Renninger, “The four-phase model of interest development,” Educational Psychologist 41 (2006) ↗
- K. Lichtman and B. VanPatten, “Was Krashen right? Forty years later,” Foreign Language Annals 54 (2021) ↗
- S. Krashen, “The case for narrow reading” (2004), PDF ↗
- A. Yanagisawa, S. Webb and T. Uchihara, “How do different forms of glossing contribute to L2 vocabulary learning from reading?” Studies in Second Language Acquisition 42 (2020)
- B. Laufer and N. Girsai, “Form-focused instruction in second language vocabulary learning,” Applied Linguistics 29 (2008) ↗
- G. Cook, Translation in Language Teaching (Oxford, 2010)
- W. T. Wallace, “Memory for music: effect of melody on recall of text,” JEP: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 20 (1994) ↗
- D. Schön et al., “Songs as an aid for language acquisition,” Cognition 106 (2008)
- K. S. LaBar and R. Cabeza, “Cognitive neuroscience of emotional memory,” Nature Reviews Neuroscience 7 (2006) ↗