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Shocking truth about passive listening

| 108 comments | Category: learning languages

A whole industry of language learning products is based on something that I have to frankly say that I think is absolute rubbish.

Some people swear by it, and yet it rarely ever produces any useful results.

The shocking truth is that passive listening is never going to get you to fluency in a language. What’s even worse is that it won’t even help your ability to understand.

Learn a language while you sleep? Dramatically improve your ability to converse by having the radio/TV on in the background for thousands of hours? Master a language while you work or do your taxes with your shiny iPod blaring noise you aren’t paying attention to?

Not a hope in hell.

This is something that really touches a nerve for me because I have met the results of this approach – people who have put thousands of hours into passive learning and they are barely any better off because of it.

It’s barely better-than-nothing.

I meet dozens of disappointed language learners every week, no matter where I am in the world, and I have declared war on the reasons holding them back from reaching fluency in their target language, and relying on passive learning (playing audio in the background while you are focused on something else) is high up on my list.

I want to destroy this myth and finally help these frustrated people do something useful. In the same way as just studying will never help you speak, passive listening will never help you speak and even understand a language.

Results of thousands of wasted hours?

I asked some people on twitter and on Facebook what their opinion of the actual results of this was and (among others) I got the following replies:

  • @hpp23 I tried passive listening but it didn’t help me in my learning. First understand actively, then listen passively & let it sink
  • @yearlyglot I think passive listening can only be done when you already know the language. But learning must be active.
  • @permanentnomad After two years of studying Japanese with it, I think my time would have been better spent speaking with natives.

I share these sentiments. When you already understand the language, it’s different – but to learn the language? The problem with embracing a passive means of learning a language is that a language is active. It requires your attention to understand and your ability to produce to actually converse.

Sorry to break it to you but you have to do some work to make progress in a language. Passive listening is a way to escape doing something useful, since you are doing something else at the same time.

Having thousands of hours of audio in the background will do you no good if you aren’t actively giving it your attention. It’s just noise unless you are actively listening to it.

My own disappointment with passive listening

This approach was already something I was sceptical about for several years, but as part of the last months’ input experiment (some of which has helped me improve my learning approach) I had the radio on in German all the time while I was doing something else (writing a book, or doing grammar or written exercises for the test) and gave it a real chance to see if it could help.

After sitting my German C2 exam, a few hours of spoken practise per week gave me 75% in the oral exam, and actively writing several texts for correction gave me 74% in the written exam, both of which I’m very pleased about. But passively hearing over a thousand hours of German radio got me a disappointing 37% in the listening exam.

The listening exam was hard, but it was very fair. The reason I got such a low result isn’t the test’s fault. It was my delusional belief that passive listening for a really long time gave me even the slightest edge. You definitely can’t listen your way to fluency, but you can’t even passively hear your way to a decent level of listening comprehension.

Some people have ludicrously suggested that I should have heard more to get a higher result. As if three thousand hours would have tripled my score(!)

The only reason I got even what I did would have been due to the spoken practise - which naturally involves focused listening. What I should have done for exam preparation is focus on any audio and analysed it while doing nothing else at the same time. I am confident that just five hours of this would have likely given me enough of an edge to pass the entire exam.

I realised this after doing an example exam a few days before the real one. If I had not done the active listening work the days before the exam, my result would have actually been even lower!

Why is it so popular?

It’s not even really passive listening I’m criticising here – that doesn’t actually exist; it’s passive hearing. When you are truly listening to something then it has your full attention.

So why is passive hearing so popular?

In this day and age we want short-cuts to everything. Drive-through fast-food, shampoo and conditioner in-one, phones that are also calculators/maps/Internet browsers/games. Sometimes this can be useful, but other times you are better just keeping it simple and doing one thing at a time. Learning languages is one of those things.

Learning a language while you do something else is lazy. It doesn’t show any devotion at all to the task at hand. It gives you a “sense” of doing something useful, and it can even be fun for some people! (Playing computer games and watching TV can also be fun, but it doesn’t mean you get anything useful out of it)

After the “honeymoon”, when you have to use the language you’ll just feel stupid that you can’t speak or understand when spoken to despite all that “work” you put in.

It answers people’s eternal question of “I don’t have time” to study/practise a language because “I’m too busy”, so just simply have it in the background to feel like you are doing work. Of course you have time! Stop making excuses and find the time! Even 10 minutes of focused learning/listening will give you way more benefits than 10 hours of noise you aren’t paying attention to.

The few benefits

Of course, there are some reasons that passive hearing can be beneficial.

However, it’s important to be aware of precisely what these reasons are! I am not writing this article to tell people to turn off their streaming radio or stop listening to podcasts – (I even wrote a post recently about how to find podcasts!) I want people to stop deluding themselves that it counts as their main useful step to fluency that deserves all the time it gets.

Here are some benefits, with some warnings:

  • In early stages, a language really feels like noise. If you have it on in the background you can get used to how it generally sounds and it seems less foreign. You don’t need to focus on it to get this feeling. I am attempting this with Hungarian to get used to the sound of the language before getting full-time exposure to it. But this is just familiarity for emotional comfort (which is indeed important) – it is not actual comprehension. Hearing Hungarian for years without actively analysing it (or better yet, using it with natives) will get me nowhere.
  • @don_rivers compared it to having coffee on your desk. You can take “sips” whenever you feel it’s important and tune in and focus when you decide to. I’d still argue that the times between the “sips” are only useful in that you are saved the “hard work” of pressing a button, and it otherwise doesn’t help. A solid distinction of right now I am focused on learning the language will help a lot of people, and they lose this if they vaguely tune in and out.
  • Even when not paying attention, your subconscious will be on the look-out for certain things. It’s like how we suddenly hear our name from across the room in a noisy party from a conversation we weren’t paying attention to. When listening to news etc. in a foreign language, you will hear key words you learned and might decide to tune in and focus then. I recognised “egy” (one) on streamed Hungarian radio and this is a confidence booster. But a thousand hours to get these minor buzzes is not worth it. The feeling is much better with natives.
  • @danielpwright says it is to be preferred over English (or your native tongue), if you  can’t actively listen/converse right now, although I would say this is just marginally better than nothing if you aren’t giving it your attention. It’s better to find some way to actively listen or converse rather than feel like you have done your language-learning work for the day.

Be more active!

I’m not trying to rain on people’s parade here – I just want learners to be clear about the fact that they need to put time into lots of different aspects of learning a language (especially speaking it). By all means, continue passively listening, but be aware of its usefulness so you try other learning approaches too and give them the time they deserve. Don’t use hearing “something” all day to get out of the guilt of not doing any real work!

Give the audio your full attention and analyse it. Even if just for a few minutes. This was my main mistake in my thousand-hour experiment. What I should have done was close my computer screen and give the audio my full focus for at least 5-10 minute segments and replay it if possible until I understood it all.

Having the radio/podcast on in the background isn’t doing you any “harm”, it can only help – the harm is in people’s understanding of how much it helps. If they think it helps more than it actually does, they may put less work into way more useful things.

Of course, my criticism on passive listening here is not related to active listening. But I’d argue that most people with their target language on in the background in some audible format, simply don’t pay attention to it, thinking that their brain is processing it magically for them. Even if this were true, without your focus you are getting a minuscule (maybe 1%?) amount of the benefit that some focus would give in a way smaller timeframe.

Rather than thinking that many hours a day “doing something” counts, take small parts of your day and do some active learning! Read in the language and try to understand as much of it as possible, listen to online radio but try to make notes of what is being said and use a dictionary if necessary – and most important of all find natives and speak to them - there is nothing stopping you from trying.

I like to study using SRS, and sometimes this gets as little as just two minutes when I’m on the metro or otherwise waiting somewhere. But that is two minutes of my full undivided attention. This is the only way to make useful progress in a language.

So please – stop trying to do everything at once! Be active with your language, even if that just involves actively listening. :) I would, of course, highly recommend finding ways to converse with natives as soon as possible.

Looking forward to your comments as always! Since I’m dropping a bombshell on a very much loved pastime of a lot of people, I expect some disagreement – but keep it relevant and insult-free or I’ll eat your comment up! I have my nom-nom-nom finger posed!

Share this on Facebook and twitter if you think more people need a fire lit under their asses!

***********************

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Comments: If you liked this post or have anything to say, please leave a comment! I love reading them :) You don’t even have to write in English! I will reply to all comments in any language listed on the right with the flags.
Just keep in mind that I’ll delete any comments that:
1. Are unnecessarily nasty and mean to me or any other commenter or otherwise totally inappropriate.
2. Are irrelevant to the particular post they follow, or leave a link to a site that is totally irrelevant or are clearly spam. If you have a general language learning question, please ask it in the forums.
3. Use a commenter name of a business or brand instead of a human being or a spammy temporary disposable e-mail service, or a clearly fake address.
But that’s not you, so don’t worry! Can’t wait to see what you have to write… don’t be shy!! :)

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  • http://twitter.com/kelliwise Kelli Chatelain

    What you said is true, however most piano, violin, etc. teachers want their students to listen to the pieces that they're learning as much as possible. It's a tool that helps but of course practicing the instrument physically is more important.

  • Mluvpomalu

    Without being able to know what the sounds mean, I see no use in just listening. If you read a written text, comprehend it, and then listen, there is great benefit in that.
    Even if to our ears it sounds fast, we get the cadence of the spoken language, which is very important.

  • http://www.fluentin3months.com/ Benny the language hacker

    I said in the article that it helps with getting used to the accent. This is useful, but won't help you with your actual ability to communicate.
    If my German simply isn't good, how did I do so well in other parts of the exam? You can NOT “cram” for speaking and even for reading or writing. That's ridiculous! You have to react in the spur of the moment for all parts of the test. Saying that listening is the “only” part of a test you can't cram for shows no understanding of such a test. If anything (as I said) some crammed focus listening may have brought my result up to a pass, but I can't imagine improving my results in other parts as easily.

  • http://www.fluentin3months.com/ Benny the language hacker

    Yep, it does do something. It's “better than nothing”, but not good enough to get all the time and energy it takes away from other aspects of language learning.

  • http://www.fluentin3months.com/ Benny the language hacker

    I disagree. I learned piano for 6 years and my teacher never assigned me listening assignments. I'd only listen to him play a piece after me as a correction, like a native would correct my spoken mistakes. My “homework” was to PRACTISE on a real piano as often as possible. I'd apply my arguments here to piano playing too. Practice helps – listening helps if you are music critic, or perhaps if you are “actively” listening to see how other players do it better than you. Although that should be less than 5% of your work if you want to be a good piano player.

  • http://www.fluentin3months.com/ Benny the language hacker

    Cadence is important, I see it as the main advantage of passive listening. Other advantages however are in only people's wishful imaginations ;)

  • http://n-true.livejournal.com André Müller

    That was my thought as well. But 17~18 is, according to most psycholinguists, already way beyond the so called “critical phase”, which usually ends with puberty (or even earlier as many suggest).

    Yes, kids can do such things. But that's not the same as passive learning. Small children are very involved in talking (esp. with their parents), they do not talk themselves because they can't, but their parents always give the words they say a meaning, speaking words that refer to actual actions and objects in the surrounding. This is how a baby can learn the language, by actively listening and seeing how the noises that come out of people's mouths actually refer to real-life situations and because there is a pattern (grammar, phonology etc.).

    But a baby will not learn a language if you always have a radio next to it, playing music and news and the weather forecast in a foreign language. So that's a difference.
    I actually wonder what would happen, if an infant grows up with listening to radio broadcast and music in, say, Japanese. Surely it won't learn the language, but it might be familiarized with its sound… oh well.

  • http://twitter.com/kelliwise Kelli Chatelain

    well I guess piano is quite different than violin. When you play the piano, the notes are always in tune (well, as in tune as the piano is at least). You might play the wrong notes, but they are still in tune. With the violin (and most string instruments) you have to tune each note yourself. Not to mention that there are different types of tuning that use different ratios (spaces between half steps and whole steps, pythagorean is one such type of tuning) that are specific to the keys that a piece is written in. That might be why my violin teacher has always told me to listen to the pieces that I'm playing. With piano, the space between a whole step and a half step is constant and can't be changed by the player, so the listening practice wouldn't be as necessary.
    I hope that all made sense…
    And don't get me wrong, I did say that physical practice is more important. ;]
    oh, that reminds me, have you heard of the Suzuki method? it fits right into this discussion :] you probably didn't use it in your piano lessons because listening is an important component.
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suzuki_method

  • http://www.MyBeautifulAdventures.com/ GlobalButterfly

    Couldn't agree with you more!

  • http://www.youtube.com/user/FluentCzech FluentCzech

    Sometimes I do wonder if “passive listening” is like lying in the bath and calling it swimming. I too have met people who have the radio or TV on in the background, and feel they are creating an immersive environment, but it is clear they have understood nothing of what they were listening too. It all simply washes over them, in effect training their brain to treat their target as noise to be ignored.

    What I have seen work, though, is people who repeat the same short section of audio for hours on end. For example, playing the same song or the audio to an Assimil lesson 30, 40, or 50 times in a loop on their mp3 player while they do other things. The constant repetition over several hours seems to help it sink in.

    Maybe this works because even when you think you are being “passive” there are still moments when you are paying attention, and maybe having earphones plugged in makes you pay more attention than to a distant radio or TV.

    Whatever the reason, this looped repetition via headphones is clearly not entirely passive: you have actively chosen what to listen to, and controlled its repetition. At the same time, it is not entirely “active” listening either.

    So, when people say “passive listening worked for me” we need to ask what kind of passive listening they were doing. TV or radio in the background would raise my eyebrows, but repeated listening to controlled content wouldn't surprise me at all.

  • Katie

    I have to disagree. For me, house chores require my undivided attention, or I don't even do them at all. I'm just wired that way. :)

  • Blahah404

    The shocking truth about this article is that passive listening is that isn’t what you’ve described at all. The term in linguistics, psychology, neurobiology etc. refers to listening without responding. Listening with response is active listening, where responses can include trying to silently remember what you just heard, repeating out loud, or performing some task in response to the content of the sounds.

  • http://www.fluentin3months.com/ Benny the language hacker

    Thanks Anthony – I saw your comment on Cody's video about this too. There may be potential in repeating the same audio over and over, but I find that such an unnatural way to learn! Surely 2 minutes of focused attention and actively repeating the audio can give the same result as 2 hours of writing a thesis with the same droning foreign sentences in the background. It's encouraging people to seek out lazy ways of making progress, and I want to get people off their iPods and looking for human beings or something more interactive to practise with.
    Having said that, I have to recognise the usefulness of *active* learning, and as you said, repetition is more active than passive. I may try out some repetitive Hungarian audio to see if it helps. However, a lot of people think of passive listening as having the radio/TV on in the background so this article needed to be read.

    The worst part is what you said at the start – “training their brain to treat their target as noise to be ignored”. It's a sad, but likely possibility that may do more harm than good.

  • Sctld

    If I remember correctly, Benny said in his German test results that he is confident that interacting with German speakers would have resulted in a better listening score.

    While I agree that passive listening should not be the be-all-and-end-all of language learning, a number of the arguments Benny makes will not be sound until he shows that he actually would have had a better listening score through interaction with native speakers.

    Therefore, I would very much welcome another “C2 in 3 Months” challenge further down the line, with a comparable language (obviously you can't learn German twice).

  • http://www.fluentin3months.com/ Benny the language hacker

    Better interaction would indeed have improved my oral score dramatically. There is no doubt in my mind about this – I got an extremely high score in the Spanish C2 because of focus on human-being practise.
    The results on my listening comprehension are different though. I think that I would need long-term exposure (more than 3 months) to naturally improve my listening comprehension results. To hack it in 3 months I'd have to do some active listening, which I didn't do much of in these 3 months.
    Another C2 mission is not going to happen any time soon. This time locked indoors studying has been stressful for me. Unfortunately studying is the best way to pass exams. I prefer to promote social interaction to improve spoken abilities. If there were some oral-only version of the C2 I'd consider sitting it in other languages.
    I may do a C2 exam again in future, but definitely not for at least another year, and maybe not even for a much longer time. Keep in mind that I've sat 3 CEFRL exams already, so I can talk with a “little” confidence of what does and doesn't help ;)

    • Sctld

      “Better interaction would indeed have improved my oral score dramatically. There is no doubt in my mind about this – I got an extremely high score in the Spanish C2 because of focus on human-being practise.”
      But you’d also been studying Spanish for a longer period of time. The point is that we cannot confirm your claim without a directly comparable test. It doesn’t matter how many other C2 exams you’ve sat or passed if your methods aren’t directly comparable.

      I appreciate that studying for a solid three months is exhausting, and I certainly do think that you have more than earned a substantial break!

      Your blog is extremely inspirational and a good source of tips.

  • Hghplus

    You have probably read SuperLearning and SuperLearning 2000. If you combine Passive and Active listening with specific music at a specific beat, you may find the results more to your liking. I have found it useful.

  • http://corcaighist.blogspot.com Corcaighist

    I agree with you. One's listening has to be ACTIVE for it to be of any benefit. One has to engage with the listening text. Take short texts and play them over and over until they sink it. Break down the language in the texts, treat it like a puzzle. Translate back and forth and construct the sentences yourself. Make the language your own. Take control of it and the you will see the benefit.

    What I do not understand is that there are people out there who think they can learn a language by just listening to/ hearing it without engaging with it. That I simply can't get my head around. If a language sounds like nonsense when you first hear it, and after 6 months of listening to it, without engaging with it, it will still sound like nonsense.

  • http://www.fluentin3months.com/ Benny the language hacker

    I know – this post has brought people with that opinion out of the woodwork. It will always be nonsense unless you focus on it, but now I have lots of people reminding me once again how crazy I am. “Of course” you can learn a language in your sleep – your magic brain is working for you without you having to do anything… [eyeroll]

    Although I've gotten the usual suspects to voice how wrong I am as usual, I hope some people take this message and realise that they need to ENGAGE in their language if they want to make progress.

  • Tdepke

    Howdy! Great blog, probably the only one I come to on a regular basis. I have a technical question though, What wordpress plugin do you use to get that nice little dropdown list of translations for your whole page on the top right of the page?

    Any hints on learning Russian?

  • http://blog.tumbledesign.com/ Nicky Hajal

    The way I see it, learning a language is a huge mental investment. Not in a conscious way but an unconscious one – your brain will need to use up a huge amount of its limited processing cycles to figure out how to make sense of these new sounds.

    So before it really goes to work for you, it needs to know that this s actually important (in an evolutionary sense, important for your survival).

    Passive listening is a nice idea, but really doesn't communicate, on a primal level, how important it is that your brain get itself wrapped around this.

    Going and talking absolutely does because you are in the moment, heart beating, adrenaline surging, soaking up every detail of the interaction. Your brain gets the message!

    I've never learned a language, simply because I have never *truly* needed to. Likewise, I never learned trigonometry until I truly needed it for a project was working on. As soon as I needed it, I got it.

    I predict that learning a language will be quite similar, when the genuine need arises.

    Until then, I will keep listening to French Info Radio just because I love those accents! :D

  • http://www.fluentin3months.com/ Benny the language hacker

    I'm not a linguist, so I'll make no apologies for not using official linguist (or nuerobiological) terminology.

    To me passive involves no focus or attention and active does. Rather than tell me I'm wrong perhaps you'd offer the correct terminology for the wasteful activity as I describe it? :)

  • http://www.fluentin3months.com/ Benny the language hacker

    You would be right if “background listening” means active listening as I've described it here. Someone else has suggested that setting your MP3 player on repeat to be exposed to a small selection of phrases repeatedly over time can help. Here, I'm mostly discussing having the radio/TV/podcasts on in the background with no attention given to them.
    Otherwise I see no difference between immigrants with background chatter and a language learner with background chatter if neither are paying attention, other than the fact that one comes from a headphone and the other doesn't.

  • http://www.fluentin3months.com/ Benny the language hacker

    That's great insight from someone who hasn't learned a language yet! You are totally right – your brain gets the message when you make it clear how important it is. Turning the target language into background noise basically gives your brain the message “this is not important to me, feel free to ignore it”.

  • Jen

    @Benny – “Seriously – NY is the easiest place outside of Europe to find Americans… ” BRILLIANT! :D I know what you meant, and I'm sure most others will too… but this is a fabulous slip. Love it! It's just so darn hard to find a good American in [Chicago, Detroit, Miami, Houston, LA, Seattle, Denver, Middle-of-Nowhere USA] these days! Thanks for pointing us in the right direction…shoulda been looking in NYC the whole time… :D

  • http://www.fluentin3months.com/ Benny the language hacker

    I've corrected that typo ;)

  • http://blog.tumbledesign.com/ Nicky Hajal

    One quick addition:

    I studied French for several years (4-5) in school – typical language learning, typical lame results.

    Then, I was in France and we got mugged. The police didn't know any English and, being the only one who knew a lick of French, the pressure was on me to work things out.

    It was stressful and scary but, who woulda guessed, I knew a heck of a lot of French when I actually needed it.

    It gives me the feeling that there is some sort of 'activation' step needed to really get comfortable in a language and that, as you suggest, actually talking to people is the best (maybe only) way to get there.

    Really interesting stuff that no doubt has a lot of big picture insights for learning in general!

    -Nicky

  • Blahah404

    You are right, sorry, my response wasn't very constructive on its own. In your post you seem to be lumping together the entire range of modes of attentiveness in listening to just two.

    The real distinctions include:
    1. Having audio playing during sleep. This is completely distinct from the other ways of approaching audio you have described, because you are unconscious at the time.
    2. Having audio playing whilst you focus intently on another task
    3. Having audio playing whilst you perform another task which requires little attention or while you perform an intermittent task.
    4. Focusing completely on the audio but only listening, without attempting to respond (for example in the ways I described in my first comment) – this is usually called 'passive listening' in the literature.
    5. Focusing completely on the audio in an analytical way, for example by listening out for particular cues or trying to analyse the content – this is called 'active listening'.

    I understand the gist of your argument – people shouldn't rely completely on background audio of any kind as their only language learning tool. But all the research does support the idea that listening to spoken audio in any stage of attentiveness (including sleep) significantly helps with learning material the next day, and with reinforcing material learned the previous day.

    There's also an obvious intuitive response to your criticisms of constant audio whilst performing some other task. There is no cost. You say people have wasted thousands of hours – they haven't wasted any time at all if they've been doing something else at the same time. Futhermore, in the case of the type of attentiveness I've listed as no. 3, there is a definite benefit to having audio playing in the background. It allows you to pattern-match and to selectively focus, and comes at no cost to the task you are performing. Don_rivers' response which you listed as a benefit is exactly right, and shouldn't be dismissed to a small mention – your objections to this type of listening are invalid.

    I agree that people shouldn't use constant audio as a crutch, but I don't believe there can be many people doing this. I also don't think your level of attainment in the recent German test your took can in any way be correlated to the amount of background audio you had playing.

    To summarise: there IS a definite benefit of passive listening, and of having background audio playing whilst you perform other tasks or during periods of low attentiveness or consciousness. The ideal way of using sleep 'listening' would be to actively study a passage in the day or evening, then to play that passage on repeat while you slept. Then actively study the passage again the next day. You would be maximising what we currently know about sleep learning, audatory processing and memory consolidation.

  • http://www.fluentin3months.com/ Benny the language hacker

    Thanks for the detailed response!

    I'm talking about 1&2 as being worthless in this post. 3 depends on the task. Washing dishes for example can allow your hands to go into autopilot and requires no concentration at all, so for all intents and purposes you are focused on the listening (and the dish-washing is “passive”).
    I find it extremely hard to swallow that playing audio while you sleep “significantly helps”. It may help you feel better, but it sounds like nothing more than pseudo-science. At best it helps the learner in that they hear the target language as they fall asleep and as they wake up, and the “noise” they don't understand will appear in their dreams and make them think they dreamt in the language.

    Also, I'm afraid there IS a potential cost and reason to look at those hours as being “wasted” and even potentially damaging. You are programming your mind to view the target language as background noise that can be ignored. This may lead you to tune out even when you are in an active conversation, because ignoring the language has been what you have learned to do.

    I will not be promoting sleep learning as there is little evidence at all to show that it helps in any practical way. A language should be presented in its proper context and dealt with consciously. Sleep learning is a lazy cop-out in my view. Its potential is to let someone think that they have done “8 hours of work” and not bother doing any more during the day, or it may program your mind to ignore that strange noise.

    As was said before, immigrants that don't learn the language are exposed to tens of thousands of hours of noise in the background and it doesn't help them. People need conscious deliberate focus – referring to the mysterious 90% of our brain we don't use or whatever isn't going to change that.

  • http://www.fluentin3months.com/ Benny the language hacker

    That isn't a wordpress plugin, it's just a bit of code that you paste into your header code. You can get it here: http://translate.google.com/translate_tools

    I don't know any Russian, however it's in the same language family as Czech. You may find some of these tips useful regarding word formation and grammar. You need to read a different script, but I'm pretty sure a lot of those tips would work quite well in Russian :)

    Otherwise you need to speak the language from day one and be confident about it, like in any other language. I've written about that in detail and my guide will be readable in Russian soon ;)

  • Blahah404

    On the contrary – there is evidence to show that it helps in some specific cases. There is no evidence that it doesn't help, it just seems to be your guy feeling. It's also pseudo-scientific to assume something without evidence and based on specious reasoning, as you've done with the role of auditory processing on memory formation during sleep. The body of research which supports the idea is no more pseudo-science than the rest of psychology.

    In particular there is a vein of research which may be interesting to you as you embark on your Hungarian mission. There have been various findings which show that when babies learning their first language, or adults learning a language with new sounds in it, listen to the language overnight, they are significantly better at distinguishing those sounds the next day. You could try this without any harm to your learning when you begin Hungarian. If it doesn't help, you've lost nothing. If it helps, great.

    I really don't suggest that you promote 'sleep learning'. This is miles away from those shill companies that sell language tapes that claim to teach you vocabulary while you sleep. There's no peer reviewed research suggesting anything like that has an effect (at least not that I could find). But there is research showing that, if coupled with active study before and after the period of sleep, audio during sleep can enhance retention of the material.

    I think your idea of a cost is based on a guess, whereas the benefits of constant audio are demonstrable. It's impossible to test the claim that you are training your brain to tune out the language. I'd suggest that the only reasonable way to assess the proposed cost it by analogue – your native language is played around you (by actual speakers, the radio, TV, whatever) your whole life. It certainly hasn't trained me to tune it out – if anything it's made me adept at noticing patterns in the background chatter (hearing my own name, people talking about a familiar topic, etc.).

    I completely agree that people need conscious deliberate focus, but again I have to say the immigrant example is not relevant, or accurate. You don't know whether hearing many thousands of hours of the language has helped those immigrants who never tried to learn the language – it may be that it would accelerate their learning if they did try to learn. We don't know, and to suggest either way is pure speculation.

    Also – the idea that we only use 10% of our brains is a complete myth – evolution would have failed us if we grew brain matter at only 10% efficiency :)

  • http://www.fluentin3months.com/ Benny the language hacker

    This is interesting, but it is certainly not pseudo scientific to assume something with no evidence to prove it! Science is based on scepticism until something fits normal reasoning. If “there is evidence” then I would need to know the precise conditions it was carried out under before taking it seriously – double blind tests, a “placebo” of chatter not in the target language just for the period the person sleeps for comparison etc. I'd argue that a course that happens to include sleep learning that has been successful, is successful for its other aspects.
    If this doesn't rely on the 10% myth then where is the logic? Why would we have evolved the ability to learn languages while we sleep? It makes no sense to me, and I say pseudo science because it sounds like the “our brain is mysterious” explanation. If it's true, so be it, but I find it utterly illogical that you can learn something worthwhile without paying attention to it.
    When we sleep our “consciousness” goes through various different stages. If it relies on the REM dreaming sequence for example this is actually a very small part of the night. The reasons why we sleep like that may be more known that I'm aware, but it would not make sense that this was the mind's time to acquire new input from the environment other than sudden noises to wake us up for survival purposes.
    The difference with your native language is that you have active learning applied *first*. So you don't learn to ignore it. If you start with passive learning then there is potential for cost. Passive learning may be efficient to reinforce your language level and maintain it if you can't get so much natural exposure, but to start that way cannot give you the same results as in your native language. It's the opposite way around, so there is potential for the brain to just label it is ignorable noise, since that is what you are training it to do.
    How is the immigrant example not relevant? They hear “gibberish” all the time. People who are actively learning a language with passive learning on the side is different. If passive learning is 5% of your time invested in a language then me arguing it away is pointless. If it's 50-95% of your time then I'd say you need to change something quickly.

  • Serge

    André,

    I've been in your shoes years ago. The reason you are not making progress is because most your input is incomprehensible. You need to find audio content that you will understand, that usually means somebody speaking more slow and more clear than usual. But at the same time don't get stuck at the same level, you need to challenge yourself with faster and faster speech. Actually that kind of input is plenty available when you converse with natives because most of them will slow down for you. If they don't, ask them. The key to progress is to keep most of your input understandable.

    But speaking to natives is not the only way to get that kind of input. I have personally improved my listening abilities and got rid of my accent using a self-study course I described here: http://thelinguist.blogs.com/how_to_learn_engli… The reason it greatly improved my listening ability (I believe) is because I was exposed to a lot of audio at varying speeds. All my input during the course was very clear to me, I didn't have to rewind and listen again and again. I found the course very effecient as I spend only 40 hours and achieved great results.

    Another way that a lot of self studying people use is to listen over and over to audio at normal speaking speed until you understand it. I admire persistance of those people. I guess it works for them, but I personally find such method exhausting and demotivating.

  • Guest

    Nothing new. Already knew by everyone. Do your repetitions, and don't be lazy. Next time the article “should talk about”, when someone reads XX book twice without a dictionary, and swearing how much improvement was hoped after finished the book (…or spent milllion hours, and did not do a single exercise).

  • Blahah404

    I agree this is interesting! Well, by definition something is pseudoscientific if it is presented as having some foundation in science, or truth, when it is not scientifically rigorous. In this case there are two factors which make the assumptions you made pseudoscientific – they are untestable and not based on inductive reasoning. But that's just semantics :)

    I agree with you that you should assess the methodology of the research. It would be nearly impossible to conduct a double-blind test in these scenarios, because the test subjects would have to be very stupid not to know whether they were listening to gibberish or a language when they woke up. It shouldn't matter – there is always blind assignment to groups. In the case of the research with babies and finnish (the only experiment I can remember in details off the top of my head), the control groups were played music or silence in their sleep. I'll dig out the rest of the papers when I have time to do a proper literature review. I think it might help you and others to read the information for yourselves.

    The 10% myth wouldn't make a good explanation of this even if it were true (you can read a good article about how it's complete nonsense here: http://goo.gl/RIwE). I think there are at least two possible cases if you want an evolutionary explanation for why we can form memories based on sounds during sleep.

    Firstly, an obvious purpose of being aware of auditory stimuli during sleep would be to notice approaching danger. This doesn't only mean being able to distinguish sudden noises, wolves howling and that kind of thing. It might also involve being able to differentiate social groups in the area, passing members of the same species and so on. The whole field is speculative but ultimately it's conceivable that there are a huge multitude of situations in which processing sounds during sleep would be adaptive for safety reasons.

    Secondly, human evolution has involved great periods of migration, settlement and integration with other races and groups (and even species – Homo erectus coexisting with Homo neanderthalensis for example). The ability to rapidly acquire a new language from your environment would certainly have been adaptive throughout most of human history. Again, that doesn't make it fact, it's all speculative. The point is that it's perfectly reasonable that it might be the case, not so outlandish that it could be dismissed.

    I do think this isn't as drastic as you perceive it to be – there is definitely no evidence that you can learn a language without putting in any effort. Your gut feeling that it should be impossible to learn with no effort is probably right. There's just a suggestion that you can compound and accelerate active wakeful learning with the right stimulus during sleep or periods of low attentiveness.

    If you look at it this way it doesn't sound so crazy, and you can look for sensible ways in which you could include it in a learning program. All the practical ways of using this phenomenon, if it is true, would have little or no negative impact as they all rely on maintaining an active learning component.

    In what way do you have active learning applied first in your native language? I think the possibility of background audio encouraging you to tune out your target language is spurious, and it's completely contrary to my own experience of Japanese. Over the last few months, I've had Japanese audiobooks or hip-hop playing constantly in the background whilst I go about my day, with activities ranging from highly attentive lab work right down to low attentive dishwashing. Over time there is a definite trend upwards in the amount of words and phrases I pick out from the background noise. At the moment, I'm picking up around 20-30 new words/short phrases a day just from the audio because I've noticed them so many times that, when I do look them up, they are remembered for good. Of course this would never work without active learning to support it – but I do spend about 12 hours a day just listening and only a few hours a day actively studying.

    It seems you accept that listening which isn't deliberately attentive might be a useful study tool, but are on a crusade to prevent people relying on it too strongly. I think if you had been more detailed and specific in the original post you could have summed up the exact usefulness of listening in its various forms accurately, and the article would have been a good resource for learners to make judgements about how to study. Still, at least you got people talking and thinking about it!

  • Liam123

    What actual products are based on the passive listening you describe?

    I am not clear, it seems that it is a big part of AJATT (which some people swear by) but there again anything anybody claims they actually learned is told “that is active not passive”. Does this not just reduce down to Shocking truth that not learning anything doesn't teach you anything.

  • http://www.fluentin3months.com/ Benny the language hacker

    “Does this not just reduce down to Shocking truth that not learning anything doesn't teach you anything.”
    Well said!
    I had a nice talk with Khatz and I'd say his method is way more complex than just having noise on in the background. He is way more active in his reading/TV watching etc. than the wasteful activity I describe here and it shows in his results.

  • lucas

    I disagree. I actually did learn how to read english by reading books several times whithout using the dictionary. Trying to figure out by yourself what a word means is probably the hardest work you can have while learning a language.

    • Guest

      Oh, I not mentioned English, no offense. It really depends on, what language I am learning, and where I am from. Let’s say I don’t learn English, and my mother language (e.g. Hungarian) is so distant from that one language (e.g. Russian (we have rather influence from Czech vocabulary, a very little), Chinese), what makes things complicated. But it should be true for vica-versa (if I am speaking a Slavic language, and should read books in Hungarian, even if I someone have a little practice in colloquial Hungarian).

  • http://brewdocinhaiti.blogspot.com brianfrommaine

    Benny, you have got to check out this link:

    http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/foru…

    It is from the how-to-learn-any-language.com forum. Someone started a post on whether background radio could help one learn a language. I am in your camp. I strongly believe that passive listening is totally useless unless you need some help falling asleep…. You would not believe the proponents of the passive listening camp! Pleading their case with scientific references no less! I still am (as you are) very skeptical of this approach.

    Hogy van magyarul?

    PS: I actually just thought of one instance where passive listening could be helpful. When I was learning Portuguese I listened to a TON of Brazilian music CD's. Eventually I was singing along (very poorly) with the CD's. I had no idea what I was singing initially but over time, as my vocabulary increased, I had several of those “A-HA!!” moments. I eventually understood most of the songs perfectly. It helped my speaking considerably. So music might be an exception to the rule!

  • http://godlark.com Godlark

    Passive listening is OK, if you know that it only make foreign language less annoying for you ears. I'm listening podcast in English, but it is active – make notes etc.

  • http://eldonreeves.wordpress.com/ Eldon

    I think you got in all the important points there – listening is important for getting used to the rhythm of the language, but just listening to people babble away on the radio ad nauseum is never going to equal fluency – not on its own, anyway. That doesn't stop it from being useful filler if you're commuting to work or whatever though.

    It's one of those things that's more useful the more you know – the more vocabulary you have and the more constructions you recognise, the more useful random listening is.

  • http://howlearnspanish.com/ Andrew

    Absolutely agreed, it's for people who are simply lazy and/or don't want to set aside the time to do it properly. The reason people buy into it is the same reason people will buy those obviously-bullshit devices you see sold on late-night infomercials that promise to make you skinny and sexy in “just 5 minutes a day!”.

    The sad thing is the people who waste literally months or even years of their lives on this method and get nearly nowhere. It's really depressing to hear about that because you know that not only did they waste that time but if they had used to study properly instead they'd REALLY be somewhere by now, but no, now they're going to have to essentially start all over again with what amounts to a very beginner's level in the language if they want to learn it.

    Cheers,
    Andrew

  • Davide Mazzetti

    I would go so far as to say that NO listening can be passive. In fact, of the four major language skills, listening is the most difficult, simply BECAUSE it requires effort and concentration to get any benefit from it. 'Passive' listening, to my mind, simply means having the language playing in the background whist ignoring it; and I don't see how anyone can learn anything from such an activity. As for learning whilst you're asleep – it's nonsense in my opinion. When sleeping, you have no awareness of the outside world, even though your brain is still 'active', so how on earth can you be 'listening' to a language when you're asleep? There's no getting away from the fact that learning takes conscious effort and there are no easy short cuts. Storebror.

  • Mr Blocked

    The fact that it works for one person is irrelevant if we can't determine *why* it works for that person and *how* another person can achieve the same results.

    If you genuinely achieved this, then at some point you developed a strategy to develop the material you encountered. The failure of many, many others proves that this is not a strategy that most people spontaneously discover.

    Passive listening/hearing is not a “technique”, because it doesn't actually describe the strategy people like you use.

    If we can't identify the strategy, then we can't recommend that strategy to others. If we can't recommend the strategy, we have no language learning technique.

    PS. what's the point of blocking someone if they can just post under any old name anyway?

  • Pavel

    Passive listening is very good, but only before you start learning the language. It helps you to remember the word correctly, instead with your native phonemes.
    However, if you already speak the language it’s useless, as you have already remembered the words incorrectly with your native phonemes substituted for the ones of the learned language.

  • http://www.fluentin3months.com/ Benny the Irish polyglot

    I’ll get to these languages soon enough, but whether you can become fluent in precisely 3 months or not isn’t what’s important, is it? ;) Hopefully my tips help you speed up your learning to be able to speak sooner!

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Brandon-Edward-Erman-Rowe/100000327375351 Brandon Edward Erman Rowe

    Now, I have a stack of Learn to speak Spanish, they say the word then speak it in Spanish, and so on,
    I was going to put everything onto my phone and a ear bud on and just play the first few section / cd, and just let it run,   I know not 100% of the time I will be really hearing it. but when I do…. ect.  I hope it helps to some point.  but, putting the Spanish channel on and watching that with no idea as to what is being said, no don’t think it will help as much.

    So… a Spanish learning CD. playing all the time,  would that give the difference?

    • http://www.fluentin3months.com/ Benny Lewis

      No!!! Argh… that’s way worse than natural content! Pay attention to your CDs and then pay attention to the Spanish channel – stop trying to find lazy ways out of doing work to learn your language!

    • http://www.fluentin3months.com/ Benny Lewis

      No!!! Argh… that’s way worse than natural content! Pay attention to your CDs and then pay attention to the Spanish channel – stop trying to find lazy ways out of doing work to learn your language!

  • http://www.fluentin3months.com/ Benny Lewis

    That’s not the same. When you are physically in the same place there is always some form of interaction, even if they weren’t conversing with you. What they are talking about is likely something more immediately relevant to you and your surroundings than any radio or TV show ever can be.

    Good job though!

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