Five Unusual, Evidence-Based Ways To Get Better At A New Language

By Emma Young The last time I tried to learn a foreign language, I was living in an Italian suburb of Sydney. My hour a week at a local Italian class was inevitably followed by a bowl of pasta and a few glasses of wine. As an approach to language-learning goes, it was certainly more pleasurable than my German lessons at school. Despite the wine, it was also surprisingly effective. In fact, getting better at a new language doesn’t have to mean hard hours on lists of vocab and the rules of grammar. It turns out that what you don’t focus on matters, too. And a glass of wine may even help …  Listen to the language, even if you don’t have a clue what’s being said – and you’re not even paying close attention One challenging aspect to learning a new language is that it may contain distinct speech sounds that, as a non-speaker, you can’t even tell apart. This isn’t a problem for young children – they only need to spend time around the new language to learn to hear the different sounds, simply through passive exposure. It’s long been thought adults can’t do this, but a study published in 2019 brings a more optimistic message and has implications for the best approach to adult language learning. The researchers asked native Finnish-speakers to listen to Mandarin speech sounds while engaged in other tasks, and to do this for two hours a day on four consecutive days. Critically, even when they were instructed to ignore the sounds and focus on a silent movie, re...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: Educational Feature Language Memory Source Type: blogs