I know I am giving away my age here but I’m going to just say it – I grew up to the tunes of Abba.

For those of you who are too young to know…Abba was a pop band from Sweden who sold hundreds of millions of records worldwide throughout the 1970s and 1980s.

They sang in perfect English but when it came to interviews, well, they were less than fluent. Now, I’m not judging them here as my Swedish is non-existent but I remember that at the time it shocked me. How could they sing fluently and speak, well, not so fluently?

This thought came back to me the other day when my daughter sang the traditional Japanese frog song Kaeru No Uta fluently. I would just like to add here that my daughter learnt this song at primary school and knows no other Japanese.

What a wonderful learning tool singing can be!  The only problem with it being your only tool is that I don’t think you could actually sing your whole way around a country or through a job interview. Still, you may be able to impress your friends or serenade your love one!