Stuck Song Syndrome
Apple music reads your listening history and curates a “Heavy Rotation Mix” (“爱不释耳” in Mandarin, lit. “love-not-let go-ear”, trans. “Your ears love them so much that they won’t let it go”) playlist for you. It is the list of songs that you have repeatedly listened to the most. It is interesting to me how the Chinese translation assumes the reason these songs are constantly on repeat is you love them, because I for the life of me do not remember having listened to half of the songs on the playlist.
I used to have this peculiar habit of reciting texts in the target language I was trying to learn. It was English for me then. My parents would buy tape recordings of English learning textbooks, and play them over and over again while I play with my toys. Very occasionally, I would murmur back the exact words that I heard in the recording, in the exact same intonation. I listened to these tape recordings for years, till the point where when I read the texts, I would hear the sentences in my head, in the voice of the narrator, with the exact same intonation. And this happens even until this day. I guess I was treating speech and its intonation like songs and its melodies.
Now, when I memorized texts with “music” in my head, weird things started to happen. Words would slip from my mouth and I would pause before I figure out what those words mean. I started hearing things in my head in a language I do not fully understand. So imagine my surprise when I unconsciously say them out loud.
See, “Heavy Rotation” is what you do prior. “Your ears love them so much that they won’t let it go” is what happens afterwards. In the context of language learning, this is especially true.