About the Suzuki Method
In recent years Dr Shinichi Suzuki developed his idea that music should be taught as a mother language is to a child. He observed that all Japanese children learn to speak Japanese quite easily, all German children easily learn German, and so on. When an adult learns a foreign language, it is much harder. The reason for the difficulty, Suzuki figured, because children learn their mother language by listening and copying, not by someone teaching them how to differentiate between verbs and nouns, how to construct a sentence, etc. These things are learned naturally by the child hearing the language correctly pronounced every day, and copying what he/she hears.
Suzuki developed a method by which the teacher would play a few notes and ask the child to copy them. Young children learn much faster this way than by reading. Glenn Doman says of this method: “English has a 450,000 word vocabulary. The number of ways in which those words can be combined is not, in fact, infinite, but it will do until infinity comes along. Music is also a language but it has seven notes not 450,000. If the ways in which these notes can be combined seems endless, it does not approach the number of ways in which 450,000 words can be combined. Since tiny children are able to learn English with its vast vocabulary so easily, then it should be easier for them to learn the language of music.”
