Listening to foreign language while asleep can help you learn it, study finds

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Are you struggling to pick up a second language? Well, you’re not alone because as part of a vote organised for European Day of Languages, Britain was previously revealed to be the most monolingual country in the continent.

But with so few hours in the day, how are we ever meant to find the time to learn another lingo?

Well the answer, it seems, could be to do it while you sleep. According to research by the Universities of Zurich and Fribourg listening to recordings of new words while you sleep could actually help you learn them.

Published in the Cerebral Cortex Oxford Journal, the study asked a group of 60 German-speaking participants to learn pairs of words in Dutch.

Half of the group then went to sleep as recordings of the words were played in a low volume, while the second half stayed awake during the recorded playback.

Interestingly, when both groups were put to the test just hours later the researchers found that the sleeping group performed significantly better than the group that stated awake.

As a result the researchers suggest that listening to words while you catch forty-winks could actually help you learn.

That being said, study author Björn Rasch points out that this alone isn’t enough to pick up a new language.

“You can only successfully activate words that you have learned before you go to sleep,” he said.

“Playing back words you don’t know while you’re asleep has no effect.”

What’s more, the researchers found that the most learning occurred during NREM sleep – the deep, dreamless sleep that tends to happen during the first half of the night.

As such, to get the best results you would ideally need to set the recording to play between around 12am and 2am, if you go to bed at 11pm.