There was an article today from the Telegraph that cited research showing that you can learn new words and their context while you are in deep sleep. Previous research showed that you can reinforce vocabulary that you were exposed to recently, but this research shows that it is possible to learn new words while you sleep.
It didn’t say how effective this is … but still, considering how much i struggle with Japanese, I might try it.
Does anyone here do this? Maybe dozing off while watching anime?
I’ve had experiences where I’ve gone to sleep thinking about a difficult programming problem and dreamed of finding the solution, but in cases like that, your brain already has all the context it needs to process the problem. I’m very skeptical that you can learn completely new things while asleep. And even if you could, I wouldn’t trust any knowledge that I’d gotten that way. How could you tell if you actually learned it or if you just made it up?
Can you get your hands on the source the article cites?
News outlets love to twist research to sound far more fantastical than it really is. Or simplify things so much it ends up being only a portion (the exciting/easy to understand portion) of the real story.
I think this falls under the “If it’s too good to be true, it probably is” mantra
Japanese takes a long time to learn, it’d be great if you could do it while you’re asleep.
I have tinnitus and one of the ways I combat it is every night when I go to bed, I have something playing whether that’s random youtube videos, podcasts or my own japanese audio loop for listening practice. I can say with 100% certainty that I only ever remember things that are playing up until I fall asleep or slightly before.
You can try it for yourself. find a long youtube video (joseph anderson is my favourite), start playing it when you go to bed and when you wakeup, see if anything sounds familiar. If you can’t remember the general gist of a video, it’s unlikely you’re going to wake up fluent in a second language.
I listen to those 8 hour YouTube videos that repeat core Japanese words. Some of them are actually pretty soothing to listen to. Not sure how much I take away from it but I do enjoy hearing a word a recognizing as I doze off.
Well, it would certainly be interesting if that worked for you, and I’d be curious to hear about it in that case. But, to be honest, it’s only ever happened for me with subjects I already knew extremely well. I already do all my reviews right before I go to bed, and I’ve never had anything like that happen with Japanese.
I have had dreams where people were speaking Japanese, but my brain just substituted all the words I wasn’t completely sure about with gibberish.
I thought this was just a myth? Last I heard, you could /try/, but if it does anything at all, it’s because it disturbs your sleep, so you actually get a worse night of sleep, since you’re forcing your brain to be active.
I’d rather just get sleep and take longer to learn, even if this did work, since I get so little already x’D
