About a year ago, I embarked on a somewhat wild journey to learn one language a month for a year.
I know that sounds crazy, but if you love languages and love learning and are the type of person who’s motivated by adrenaline and tight deadlines, it’s also a lot of fun.
However, I also happen to be a single working mother of two.
At first, it was easy and fun. Then it became fun but less easy. Eventually, I had to come to terms with the fact that I wouldn’t have the time to maintain the knowledge of all the languages I’d learned (apart from a few favorites—I fell in love with Thai and Arabic and didn’t want to let them go). But even just the learning part was very time-consuming.
Did I mention that I have kids and had to work to pay the bills?
“Where do I fit all that learning?” was the question constantly on my mind during those first few months of the journey. I was already doing most of my learning by listening to audio content while walking the dog, washing the dishes, or watching my daughter’s gymnastics practice.
So it was only natural that I started wondering if maybe I could use my sleeping hours for learning as well. Can you learn a language in your sleep? I’m here to share with you what I found out.
Can you learn a language in your sleep?
When I was growing up in the Soviet Union, it was common wisdom that the night before a school test you put the textbook under your pillow to help you cement what you’ve learned during the day.
I’m not certain about the mechanics of that process (like, did the words on the pages of the textbook leak through its hardcover, through the filling of your feather pillow, through your skull, and into your brain tissue?)—but I credit that practice with my success in school.
This time I decided to take it one step further and try actually learning new information in my sleep.
I found the very official-looking Sleep Learning website that promised me that listening to their “specially prepared CDs” while unconscious “has proved to be a highly effective way for people of all ages to realize their full learning potential […] enabling you to learn foreign languages, pass exams, and undertake professional studies […].”
Additionally, the website warned me that “the average human only uses 5% of normal brain capacity, [while] the other 95% goes to waste.”
Who wants the precious 95% of their brain to go to waste? No one, I would think. I especially needed all the brain space I could get my hands on.
But what finally did it for me was the information on the Sleep Learning website about the history of this practice in the Soviet Union (where I grew up sleeping with a textbook under my pillow) and the research into it over the years. While it’s mostly been researched in the former USSR, it’s also been studied in the US and other parts of the world. Per the Sleep Learning Website:
“In Minnesota, several hundred people stopped smoking when they tuned their radios to an overnight sleep-learning program designed to help them quit. In England, a television producer announced that he would learn Spanish by the sleep learning method. After two weeks, he demonstrated his success by broadcasting in Spanish—with a very good accent! In California, 70 people a day reported that listening to an early morning radio broadcast of sleep-learning messages dramatically decreased their desire to overeat.”
I was sold and ready to get started.
What happened when I tried to learn a language in my sleep
Thankfully, I didn’t go so far as to buy the “specially prepared” sleep learning CDs.
Instead, I went on YouTube and found an eight-hour-long video that promised to teach me the 2,000 most important Thai phrases while I was sleeping. Excellent.
That night, as I went to bed, I put my phone screen down next to my pillow and turned on the video.
“What are you doing tonight?” said the voice in the video and then repeated the same phrase in Thai. OK, not the most sleep-inducing first phrase but whatever.
“It is too hot,” the video continued and again translated it into Thai for me.
It continued like that for I don’t know how long because I started dozing off. The binaural beats in the video were somewhat sleep-inducing (or maybe I was just super tired already), so I kept falling asleep in the breaks between phrases—but then the voice in the video kept waking me up. “What’s the weather will be like today?”…“Would you like to see a movie?”…“I don’t like to eat eggs for breakfast…”
I didn’t sleep very well that night. I kept having dreams about couples going out to fancy bars only to have scrambled eggs. Somewhere in the middle of the night, I must have paused the video (I see in my YouTube history that it’s not watched until the end) to never open it again.
I woke up the next morning with a headache, dark circles under my eyes, and exactly the same amount of Thai that I had the night before. I had no recollection of how to say, “I don’t like to eat eggs for breakfast,” or any of the phrases that the video tried so hard to teach me.
Maybe the proponents of sleep learning would’ve said that I should’ve persevered and listened to it every night for a month to get the desired results, but I shuddered at the mere thought of someone talking to me again out loud while I was trying to sleep.
Here’s how sleep can help you with your learning
As you can now tell, my sleep learning experiment didn’t go very well. But what I’ve learned over the last year—and what’s been confirmed by research—is that sleep and learning are intimately related.
First of all, research has repeatedly shown that lack of sleep impairs your ability to focus and learn.
Secondly, sleep helps us consolidate memories and helps strengthen connections in the brain. Research conducted by neuroscientist Matthew Walker, PhD, found that a midday nap could significantly boost your learning capacity.
That’s why some health experts recommend following up an intense learning session with a 20- to 25-minute nap (or a non-sleep deep rest session).
This is a rule I’ve personally adopted—and unlike the sleep learning video, it’s truly helped me during my crazy year of 12 languages.
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