Sleeping takes up 8 hours from our daily clock.
As a language learner, it can be tempting to tap into those peaceful hours, since life is too busy and hectic during the day.
So should you learn a language while sleeping? Does it work?
It is possible to learn a language on your sleep. However, you only learn when your brain is partially active while receiving input through audio. This is not efficient and you should instead let your brain rest in order to have better memory and improved recall the next day.
Learning while sleeping, also known as hypnopaedic learning, can be a useful tool for acquiring a language. But it’s not advisable because it comes with a catch.
Before you go and dive into sleep learning, here are some facts you need to know and can be useful a language learner.
Fact #1: Sleep is Highly Beneficial to Learning Anything
Whether you’re into language learning or any other skill, sleep reinforces what you learn during the day and makes you better the next day.
There’s a concept called ‘consolidation’ where you brain becomes active in strengthening your memory by recalling your previous activities. That’s why you often find yourself solving problems after coming out of a good night’s sleep.
And let’s not forget, sleeping rejuvenates your body and helps you focus clearly the next day. If you’ve deprived yourself of sleep before, then you know the feeling. It’s not fun to get back to your textbooks or language apps when you’re still groggy from yesterday.
Fact #2: Your Brain Is Active During Sleep
Your brain is not asleep when you sleep. That’s because it creates new neural connections even in your deep slumber.
Not only that, sleep reinforces memories and recalls the daily activities you’ve had. The keyword here is recalling (or retrieval) – it is the key process that allows you to build lasting memories in your brain.
This retrieval process is what makes flashcards and SRS possible. It calls upon the memory right before you forget the information and reactivates it to make it last.
If the previous day you’ve spent a lot of time studying, then after coming out of sleep you’ll be surprised to know that you’ve already remembered what you’ve studied.
Fact #3: You’re Not Always On a Deep Sleep
There are times when you’re “partially awake” and are therefore conscious. Those gaps are the hidden opportunities to take input from your audio player and learn the language.
Plus, when you take bathroom breaks during the night, you won’t always be able to come back to sleep right away. Again, you can leverage that to play some podcasts until you fall asleep.
As you fall into deep sleep though, the audio player just runs in the background. Once you gain part of your consciousness would you be able to absorb input again.
Fact #4: True, Efficient Learning Happens In “Cycles”
If you’re into lifting weights, you know that you train your muscles by stressing it out, then recovering to build new muscles.
Believe it or not, the same “stress and recovery cycle” happens in language learning. Barbara Oakley mentions the two forms of thinking called the Focused Mode and the Diffused Mode, which operates in the same way as stress and recovery.
When fully engaged in a language (such as when you’re studying), you activate the focused mode. But once you’ve exhausted yourself because of focusing, it goes into diffused mode to have a break and let the brain consolidate what it has learned.
Guess what, if you’ve been studying hard on your target language during the day, then sleep is one powerful hack to fully grasp what you’ve learned. You end up taking the gains during the day and carrying them over the next day.
End result, you get a little bit better at your target language for almost no effort. And all you did was go to sleep.
Back to the Question: Should You Learn a Language While Sleeping?
In the end, choosing to learn while sleeping is a preference. I’m definitely curious to try it out to expand my arsenal of learning tools.
Given the points stated above, how do you then decide if sleeping with languages is worth doing?
First of all, if you want to maximize time and productivity, then play your audio and go to sleep. Like I said, you can take advantage of a good chunk of time while still partially awake or just taking a bathroom break. You might as well use a dedicated MP3 player to run 24/7 and wear your earphones when you feel like listening.
Sleep learning works better if you’re already familiar with the language. If you’re at a level where the language is already easy to grasp, then your brain will absorb it with less effort. Not unlike when you’re still a beginner, where you won’t understand much and end up filtering out almost everything.
Use sleep as a way to consolidate and utilize the learning cycle. If you believe in the science of learning, then from now on you shouldn’t underestimate the power of sleep in your progress as a language learner. Realize that whatever language struggle you come up with, often times the solution is simply to sleep it out, then wake up the next day having figured it out.
Your overall health matters, don’t sacrifice it. You need quality sleep in order to rise up energized and rejuvenated the next day. When you practice a healthy lifestyle, it will affect all other areas in your life, including your pursuit of languages.
When it comes to top language learning hacks, sleep learning is NOT what you’re looking for. It only supplements your sleeping time with some input to work on, which may not be that effective. Ideally, you want to align your strategy with your specific purpose for learning your target language, For example, if you want to watch foreign movies without relying on native language subtitles, then immerse yourself in similar movies and brave through the struggle of watching them without relying on your native language.
Are you ready to grab your audio player and start learning languages while sleeping? Let me know in the comments if you’re ready to take the plunge.
