Class 78 told you to listen to Malayalam songs. This one tells you to sing them — and explains why it is the single most underrated pronunciation exercise available to you. Let me make the case first, because you may be reluctant. REASON ONE — MELODY FORCES VOWEL LENGTH Class 52 covered the hardest thing in Malayalam for an English speaker: holding a long vowel twice as long as a short one, and never quite managing it. A song will not let you cheat. If the melody holds a note for two beats, you hold the vowel for two beats. You cannot rush it, because the tune will leave without you. Singing is a vowel-length drill that corrects you automatically, without you having to think about it at all. REASON TWO — MELODY CARRIES MEMORY Words learned inside a tune are stored differently and more durably than words learned on a page. You know this from your own life: you can probably still sing songs you have not thought about in twenty years, whose words you could not possibly have recalled by effort. REASON THREE, AND NOBODY MENTIONS IT — SINGING BYPASSES EMBARRASSMENT The largest obstacle for adult learners is not memory or grammar. It is self-consciousness — the fear of sounding foolish, which stops the mouth from moving. Singing removes it. Nobody expects a singer to sound like a native speaker. You are allowed to be enthusiastic and imperfect. And while you are being enthusiastic and imperfect, your mouth is doing exactly the physical work it refuses to do in conversation. So: sing. Badly. In the car, in the kitchen, alone. Quizzes below. Dr. Reshmi R Nair — SpeakMalayalam.