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Mind

You can learn foreign words as you sleep but it won't make you fluent

People who were played fake translations in their sleep could recall which category of words they belonged to when they woke up

By Jason Arunn Murugesu

13 June 2023

We can process and store new information as we sleep

Dmitriy Bilous/Tetra images RF/Getty Images

Listening to foreign recordings and their translations while you sleep could help you learn a new language, although the extent of the benefit appears modest.

Knowing that our brains are always active, Flavio Schmidig, previously at the University of Bern in Switzerland, and his colleagues wanted to see if they could exploit this to help people memorise foreign words while they slept.

First, they monitored the brain activity of 30 German speakers while they spent one night in a sleep lab. …

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