Play it by Ear Lesson

I’ve talked about idioms in this blog before (phrases that are particular to a specific people, district, community, or class), and because they are one of the most difficult things about learning a new language, I’m going to talk about another one today (and I’m sure again in the future). The phrase we’ll be looking at is “play it by ear.” The difficulty about an idiom is that it cannot be understood by looking at the individual words within the phrase; you have to look at the whole phrase to understand them.

“Play it by ear” simply means that there are no plans made that will either help us do whatever we are going to do, or tell us what we will do after doing something else. Are you even more confused? Let me give an example.

“When we get to the park, I’m not sure what we will do first. Let’s just play it by ear when we get there.”

This sentence tells the listener that the plan is to go to the park, but after that, there are no other plans. What they will do when they get there will be decided after they arrive.

“Play it by ear” is an easy expression to use, because it is always used the same way (Well, almost always, but I’ll talk about that a little later). Here are some more examples.

Question: “What do you want to do next Saturday.”

Answer: “I’m not sure. Why don’t we just play it by ear?”

“I thought I knew exactly what to do, but I decided to play it by ear instead.”

Ok, I said the phrase was always used the same way. Well, that’s true when used as shown above. One other use is for a very specific reason, and so you may never hear someone say it. In music, if someone is playing a song on an instrument for the first time, and he do not have the written music in front of him, we would say he is “playing it by ear.”

“He was asked to perform a popular song from a recent movie, but he didn’t have the music, so he had to play it by ear.”

Now that you know about this expression, don’t worry about when you will use it. Just play it by ear!