![]() Wanting to test hypnopaedic learning for themselves, linguists at the language website MosaLingua ran their own study in 2016. According to skeptics, that’s not groundbreaking science as much as it is common sense. Students allowed to rest will almost always perform better than exhausted students who have been forced to listen to the same monotonous vocabulary recording drone on and on until 2 a.m. If anything, their brains were just mapping connections among the words that they learned while awake.įurthermore, it’s possible that they didn’t learn while they were asleep-they learned because they were asleep. For example, all of the German students had heard the vocabulary words at least once before, so while sleeping, the participants weren’t truly taking in any new information. Opponents of subliminal language learning qualify or even outright reject the results of the study, citing numerous alternative explanations for the psychologists’ findings. “People can't learn any new verbal information while they're asleep,” says Anat Arzi, a neuroscientist and sleep-learning specialist at the Weizmann Institute of Science. This, according to the psychologists, proves that hypnopaedic learning is not just viable-it’s more effective than conscious learning! Those who absorbed the new vocabulary while sleeping did significantly better at recalling the words than those who attempted to learn solely while awake. At 2 a.m., the psychologists woke everyone up and tested both groups. Afterward, half of the students were directed to go to sleep while a recording of the new vocabulary played, and the other half listened to the same recording again while awake. At 10 p.m., all of the students were taught a list of Dutch words that they had never seen before. In 2014, Swiss psychologists at the University of Fribourg tested this with sixty German-speaking students. The Swiss National Science Foundation is convinced that it can. Can sleep-learning take place over the course of a single night? While comatose, they weren’t doing vocabulary drills and diagramming grammar, so some sort of hypnopaedic learning must have occurred. In 2014, a twenty-two-year-old Australian man woke up with a perfect command of Mandarin. In 2010, a thirteen-year-old Croatian girl awoke speaking German like a native. There is a precedent for achieving fluency while unconscious, as dozens of people have emerged from comas completely fluent in another language. A quick search for products promising to make listeners bilingual turns up dozens of get-fluent-quick products in everything from Spanish to Tamil. The most famous example of subliminal language learning is hypnopaedic learning-that is, learning while sleeping. Sure, adults’ brains are a little less malleable, but they should still be able to pick up common phrases through sheer exposure. They silently absorb the world around them. They don’t cram flashcards or glue themselves to the latest language-learning app. After all, babies pick up their mother tongue this way. The concept of picking up a language without trying is called subliminal language learning even if you’re not paying attention to anything being spoken, your brain will automatically remember commonly repeated words and form connections between those words and their definitions in your native tongue. So…is it? What is subliminal language learning? Sit back, relax and let your subconscious do the trick. Right?Įndless websites, podcasts and even YouTube playlists promise that you can learn a language subconsciously just by passively exposing yourself to it, without any effort. In no time, you’re guaranteed to be fluent. Turn on an Arabic TV show without subtitles and let the colloquialisms wash over you. Play Vietnamese radio while you cook and absorb vocabulary while chopping onions. Pop on a pair of headphones before bed and learn Italian in your dreams.
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