Will Sleeping While Listening To A Song In Another Language Help You Learn That Language

Does passive listening really help to learn a language?

Just to be clear: To me passive listening is an effortless form of listening, where the content is just played in the background and we don’t focus on it too much.Now this definition is already telling: with no effort there won’t be much improvement.Here are some common effortless “study” techniques.Listening in sleep. Some claim you can improve your language skill by listening in your sleep. Other research shows that noise during sleep can negatively impact our health, so I wouldn’t risk it.Listening to music. You may pick up a phrase or two, but if you aren’t focusing on the lyrics how will you?Watching films with subtitles. You will focus on subtitles to follow the film not the text. Without subtitles you will understand nothing, and definitely not learn anything.Changing the language of games and phones. It will only be frustrating if you don’t know in advance the names of at least some of the functions you need. It will make you slower in the game and at using your phone.The only things passive listening can do for you is:familiarise your ear with the melody, prosody, accent, and pace of the language.help strengthen vocabulary and phrases you already know. You will naturally pick them out from an unfamiliair text.There are a few forms of listening that others classify as passive, but to me involve a little more cognitive effort as you actually need to focus on the content of the foreign language text. I think those can be much more helpful, and can be combined with extra activities to help retain more information:listening to audiobooks, especially those which you know in your mother tongue;listening to podcasts on topics that interest you;listening to the news. Especially if you already know what the news are. The news are usually couples with pretty straight forward images, so you can easily decode the vocab.listening to short clips multiple times. This is equivalent to repeating, or re-reading a word multiple times. Somewhat like in Pimsleur.Check out best language learning audio resources here.

How useful is listening to music in second language learning?

I think music is extremely useful for learning another language, for many reasons.  One of the main problems language learners face is limited input.  There are only so many hours in a day, and classroom settings don't allow enough time for the repetition and practice we need to master a language,  Music can fill some of these gaps, especially if you enjoy listening.  Memorizing and reciting (or singing) the songs is wonderful, of course, but simply listening is fantastic. You can learn lots of culture, vocabulary and pronunciation from songs, if you enjoy them.  Things that are very difficult to learn from textbooks-- intonation, specific grammatical features, and so on-- can be easier to master through songs.  Refrains from songs are easy to remember, and are good mental models for structures that you might otherwise have to memorize.I can't recommend music strongly enough... it's the most underrated and underused resource!Roughly translated, carpe diem!

If you listen to a language while asleep will you pick it up faster?

I doubt it.I was in junior high school when I read a sci-fi book in which the characters go to a language lab and are put in a state of induced sleep. When they came to, they found themselves miraculously able to speak the language of Venus (the planet, not the love goddess). I think the book was Space Cadet (1948) by Robert Heinlein, best known for his Stranger in a Strange Land.A few years later, my part time college job was as lab assistant in Foreign Languages.  I played tapes for language learners who sat in individual booths listening to the tapes and repeating/answering them. The tapes were so bloody boring that the students sometimes fell asleep, and had to be gently reawakened so they could get to their next class. Disappointingly, it was not evident that they learned anything while they were asleep...It seems to me self-evident that only meaningful input can contribute to language learning. When you are asleep, context and meaning are absent, so it is hard to see how sleep learning a second language would work.

Is it possible to learn a new language by just listening to it?

There are 2 basic types of learning when it comes to language, passive and productive. Passive skills are reading and listening while productive skills are speaking and writing. Passive skills are much easier to acquire and as a result allow you to "learn" the language faster. That being said, you cannot learn any productive skills without actually working on them. That's why they're called productive skills. Personally I think this is what everyone should at least try to do but often times it's quite intimidating. As far as listening is concerned, I personally believe that you can achieve a rather high level of passive proficiency simply by listening and reading but that only goes so far and is one sided. Also, it depends on what your objective is. If you just want to watch foreign films and understand then that's a great route to go but if you want to be able to speak and communicate, then you've got a bunch of work to do.I have this weird sort of theory that people could actually achieve a high level of communication if they had a passive understanding of several languages and just spoke their own native language and people could understand each other. (Picture Han Solo and Chewbacca. They both speak their native tongues but they can understand each other just fine) I've done this a few times while traveling and made new friends who didn't speak much English and I didn't speak much German so we spoke our own native languages and communication went smoothly. It was work but way less work then me learning German or them learning English. Sometimes I also do this with my Brazilian girlfriend.