I literally felt betrayed when I took my first French class in high school and learned that the correct phrase is actually "omlette au fromage". How could Dexter's Lab lie to me?????????
May be super obvious, but having a busy, physically taxing day is almost a sure-fire way to be sleepy. Like walk a bunch, learn a bunch, work out, work, etc. And no screens an hour before bed
I miss your language learning streams! I'm trying to actually get serious about learning Czech, and even if it's not the same language, it's a nice motivator to sit down and study. Love your videos!
Back when I was learning Swedish, I listened to a lot of Swedish radio even before I knew any usable amount. One day I fell asleep while listening to Swedish radio and when I woke up, I understood a conversation in Swedish for the first time in my life. It was some radio play and I still remember that one man was trying to get another to jump in the water, while that other one was arguing that he can't swim. Before that I could only understand things like "homosexual" and "they're dancing naked", dirty mnemonics, as you say.
Being made to process Swedish before the mental barrier of "listening for what you know" could set in might be exactly what you needed. That barrier is also where the "I'm better at my target language after two drinks" meme comes in.
@@constantwin It also helps to avoid confusions that the orthography would cause. You get to learn words the way they are pronounced instead of the way they are written.
My sleep hygiene: eat melatonin, still have insomnia, try again, if it didn't work, drink coffee and pass out at the end of the day, wake up at 1am, repeat
Not exactly the same, but,… In 7th grade, when I taking my first foreign language class (German), the class was in the final period of the day. Consequently, the sounds of the German words and sentences, were echoing in my head during the ride home- at the end of every school day. I believe that this was very helpful in my absorbing of the language.
<a href="#" class="seekto" data-time="625">10:25</a> flashbacks to me as a kid whispering "mom" from the other side of the hallway only for my mom to bolt upright mumbling a sleepy "what"
I just started implementing a sleep time routine this week (drs. orders). So, low light 1hr before bed, no screens 1/2 hr before bed, deep breathing (inhale for 4, exhale for 6) for 10 min before sleeping. Your vid gave me an incentive to now turn on my Korean podcasts before bed and just let it plays as I fall asleep.
Two tips for sleep that have helped me a LOT. First, no bluish lights for a couple of hours (minimum) before bed. The blue band of the visible light spectrum tells your brain it's daytime, and can interfere with the production of melatonin (the sleep hormone). So use your settings on your phone and computer, etc., to shift the display into the red band or at least out of the blue. (I even turn off my lights for the last hour, with the exception of a lamp that I've covered in a red bandana.) Second, mentally review how your day went. What were the main things that you did, and that happened to you? Deal with any unresolved feelings about those events if necessary. Then write a list of things you plan to do the next day (works even better if you've already done this-- if you update the list throughout the day. I use my calendar app to schedule them). That way you can set today aside, and remind yourself that you don't need to think about tomorrow (because it's already on your list). This tip helps ensure you're not going to bed thinking about your day or about tomorrow's day. If this process brings up any dysregulation in your nervous system, use some regulating resources to come back into a calm, safe, peaceful state (if you know what I'm talking about). Bonus tip (because I forgot to make this list three items long): brush your teeth at least an hour before you go to bed. That way you're not standing under the bright bathroom lights right before going to sleep. I struggle with sleep because of my history of trauma, and because it just gets harder as people get older. These tips have made a huge difference for me. I hope they'll help someone else as well!
Whoa that second was is cool, can see how it might help. My best tips: have a wake up time and a bed time… and avoid (excessive) alcohol. I can’t attest to giving it up entirely but anything over 2 drinks royally screws my nights sleep.
My sleep tip is to avoid super emotional things right before bed, especially things that make me angry! No politics/news. Anger or other high emotion makes it hard to sleep. :) Now I have to go hunt for some Japanese sleep stories.
Totally anecdotal (and dumb), but: I am learning Swahili. One night, i had a dream in which I was doing a Swahili lesson. The next morning, I definitely felt like I had genuinely learned -- not new words, but I could retrieve words that I already knew, faster.
I often put a target language audio book or Tv series on as i go to sleep. I get lulled to sleep by the sounds and rhythms of the new language - i spend a few minutes picking out the actual content that i understand - then i get more sleepy and it’s just noise. Dunno if it helps learning BUT - i am not as ‘aware’ and ‘awake’ as something i might stay awake to listen to AND apparently my pronunciation and intonation in my target language is pretty good without me actually paying much attention to it.
In studying the nature of learning (I teach weaving and spinning), I have stumbled upon most of these principles, or analogs of them, while watching my students. After some time around the table for the lecture portion, we go to the looms and do work there involving motion. We take a break from at-loom work, and have more lecture time (switch tasks), and when the students then go back to the loom, they are better for having had a break to process what they learned earlier; the break is as important as the lesson. Similarly, as the Japanese found out in a study of train safety protocols (I read this one some years ago in Smithsonian, but I’m sorry to say I have no citation), the researchers found out that if there were 3 sensory inputs (a physical motion, an auditory input, and an optical input), the subject would not make a mistake, because if one of the inputs was wrong, it introduced cognitive dissonance and shut down the approval process in the brain of the train conductor. Transferred to something more practical to my students, they had to watch, speak and hear a description, and move their arm as they performed a new process; they stopped making mistakes in that process. As a teacher, I find the nature of learning fascinating! Thanks for the video.
I'm learning french, somewhere between A2 and B1 according to the AI, and i recently played a stop smoking sleep hypnosis en francais while i was dropping off. Guess what?! I had no desire to smoke the following day!! And no memory of hearing what the hypnotist actually had to say for himself 😮
There was a period of my teenage years where I slept with the radio on. And it really didn’t seem to impact my sleep at all unless a song came on that I really liked and I was dreaming. Then the dream would become all about the song, usually with a rock band manifesting and giving an impromptu concert. After which, the dream would carry on as if that didn’t happen.
In one of your recent videos you made a side-comment about linguists not even really agreeing on what a word is. I keep thinking about that ever since you said it, and if it's not already on your topics-for-videos list, I'd certainly appreciate a deep-dive into whatever the controversy there is and what the competing ideas are in the linguistics word for the definition of a "word."
I realized that it might work when I noticed that the recordings I was listening to infiltrated my dreams. On the other day I remembered that the recording was playing inside my dreams. I also remember that I was already quite annoyed by the sound, at some point I tried to turn it off, I took out my headphones but the sound didn't stop playing because I was in a dream, but the sound was coming from outside. I believe if someone wants to try this, it's a good idea to start journaling about your dreams, it will help copying memories to long term storage.
love your work, thanks for all the great content! I have a video request for you: an explanation of grammar concepts for all languages, not specific to one language (i.e. as a tool to help people understand what a grammatical construct means in any language)
This was interesting to watch. I’ve started working on my German lessons about an hour before bed instead of in the morning, and I’ve noticed a difference. For the last week or so I’ve gone to sleep listening to a German radio station. I usually listen to music to fall asleep anyway so I enjoy it and I think it might help.
Honestly, this has been my experience as well. In Latin America we eat late and I was able to warm back up to Spanish faster than my German where the sidewalks roll up after dark. 🤷🏻♀️
As an architecture student, I used to take a nap when I got stuck on a design and often would get the solution while sleeping. Later, I would routinely tell my son to review for his test one last time just before he went to bed for the night and it seemed to help. So this makes sense to me.
I knew about the smell, I even tipped off my students. But combining it with sound: brilliant. And fairly obvious, with all the other things allready known. However, I never thought of it myself...
Have you heard about these extreme cases where people go into comas and come out speaking their non-native language while forgetting their native language?
Woah this help explain my own linguistic imbalances. During my PhD I used to read Old English/Norse/Saxon poetry before sleep (in second year, this was Latin). And these - especially Old English - are now much stronger than many other languages I've studied which I now realize I've used mostly in the daytime.
Likewise actually, in final year (I'd finished all the poetry) I ended up listening to tv shows wiht audio description while I fell asleep. This was mostly Swedish so I used to listen to that most night before I dozed off, and my Swedish now is much stronger than any of my modern languages (besides English obviously).
Catalan while you catch some Z’s…? also was only listening and got a Audible 1984 ad right before the intro. Took me too long to realize it was even an ad
I am retired. I have Long COVID which messes with my sleep, energy, cognitive thingy. Brain. Anyway, I never go to bed until I'm sleepy. I don't push, and stay up because I want to finish this chapter or whatever. Sleepy? Sleep? Wake up at stupid o'clock? Get up and do stuff. Obviously impractical for most people, but treating sleep like eating (eat when you're hungry, stop when you're not hungry [NOT when you're FULL]) is what works for my circs.
good job Jones. Yet another reason for me to get better sleep that I will tell myself I'll listen to and not end up following (because I procrastinate sleeping lol).
my fitness influencers say that i have to sleep well, now my language learning influencers have started the same. is good sleep a hype now? rise and grind!
A book under your pillow does work if you believe it works (and have actually studied). It's a symbolic gesture, a covenant between your waking and sleeping self that yes, that stuff in there is important, you both agree to mull it over in your sleep, to prioritise it over, what, dreaming about that cutie in your class or whatever. Now with that out of the way you might become cynical about it and do the gesture with a conscious plan, a utilitarian motive. You've just broken the covenant: Your waking self can't just decide on its own, you both have to do it, and your sleeping self is probably going to be stroppy about such a transgression. Therefore it's better to not believe in it but also don't mind if you do it because it also works if you don't believe in it it's not you who's doing the sleeping, after all. Psychology is a confusing mistress.
I was thinking about someone utilizing the memory palace technique while lucid dreaming. But, you covered that when you said that the encoding has to be done while awake.
That's interesting. I honestly would have thought that phonology was also trainable while sleeping, given, as you say, that keyword and affect recognition are online. And I find myself wanting to repeat the study varying the morphological style of the language, because my engineering background makes me want to propose the hypothesis that basically you might be able do filters and finite state machines, but not stacks, while asleep.
When you cover a study like this, would you mind also talking about the size of the effect? How much better did the people who listened or smelled actually do?
So here's a dilemma: 1. I have ADHD, which makes it really hard to consolidate new information even if I'm fully invested in learning something 2. I also may have narcolepsy (still awaiting lab results). On the upside, that means it's really easy for me to get my snooze on whenever I feel like it and thus try to consolidate some of those memories 3. Taking Concerta for my ADHD both sharpens my focus and dramatically improves information processing 4. Concerta's a stimulant and completely negates point #2
I watched a video of yours where you said people misunderstand grammatical gender by thinking "bridge = girl, floor = boy" (or something like that). Can you talk about that more? I'm learning Russian where gender follows a simple pattern 99% of the time and nouns/adj's decline depending on their role in the sentence. Russian made me think gender is just a name for the different patterns based on how a word sounds. Like if a word ends in '-a' in the nominative, then we can't add an '-a' to denote the genitive, so instead we'll change '-a' to '-i'. But the little things I know about other languages like French, gender doesn't follow a clear pattern so how would these patterns for inflections evolve in the first place? And in Russian, the Acc+Gen overlap for animate(human,animal) male nouns, and the Acc+Nom overlap for INanimate male nouns. Yet female nouns have their own unique accusative. Is this related to the simple speech patterns, or is it ideas from human gender projected onto grammatical gender? As in, female nouns are acted ON without considering their animacy ('object' is the sense of the accusative, and 'from, of, by' is the sense of the genitive). And who decided that all girl names must end in -a. And all nicknames will end in -a for both men and women.
Interesting! I wonder if melatonin interrupts the consolidation process, as it sure does seem to turn my brain right off so I can sleep. Hmm. Rose water and cardamom while I study, while I sleep- nice!
There's also evidence that hearing new words during REM sleep is effective for recall, whereas hearing new words during non-REM sleep is actually counter-effective for recall. Here is the video that discusses that research: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-C9VU3QapkkE.htmlsi=zolDMAvstmJ_WhFP
Could please give a link to this German study/studies? Did the researchers use randomization? I am skeptical. Maybe this also works because Dutch is very close to German.
If you wanted to improve your ability with a language that you're already familiar with could you have a program that periodically speaks to you in open ended questions or conversation prompts that you could interact with in a dream state? I'm asking because I've had my alarm clock buzzer (early 2000s years) incorporated into my dreams before.
Just commenting for the algorithm...on which topic, are neural nets trained with a sleep/consolidation phase now? I wonder how many of the analogies to human brain function they're following (since neural nets for AI seemed to start as just "this is what human brains do, let's try it").
I've considered olfactory memory priming for helping compartmentalize when studying different languages. I always want to pick something culturally relevant like a funky cheese for French. I don't that would carry over well when applying to this research...
