Subliminal Learning?
Learning is of course sublime, but can it be subliminal? (President Bush would condense this to wondering if it's subliminable.) The short answer, in my experience, is no. I've tried "subliminal" courses for Spanish, Japanese and Turkish. The Japanese and Spanish ones, which fed the English quietly into one ear and the Spanish, more loudly, into the other were, in a word, useless. The Turkish course offered very very quiet (sub-audible) lessons after a crashing wave sequence that was supposed to induce a light hypnotic trance. The course taught me no Turkish, but if I need a good night's sleep, it's great to listen to fifteen minutes before bed.
While I'm dubious about subliminal learning, there is something to be said for learning right before bed, on the way to the calm of sleep and with no new inputs coming up to disturb what you've learned. To that end, I've been reading a lesson or two in the Peace Corps manual right before bed, formulating my own dialogue with the night's material and then listening to the drills for Colloquial Uzbek right before going to sleep. What I've found is that while I don't necessarily remember the material for production, when I look at it later I have little trouble following what it says. More importantly, I find that when I look at words I had had to pick apart to decipher before, the various agglutinative particles pop out at me and grammar explanations that had left me baffled make perfect sense.
The before bed, I think, ties in with the reading aloud bit. In both cases, you're getting your mind set on a pattern that's new but that it's perfectly capable of learning. The reading bit gets your mind and mouth used to what's going on and interested in making it work together; the before bed bit lets you wrap your head around things - again - without your conscious efforts at comprehension getting in the way of what is not logical, per se, but just the way that language works.
When I was in grad school, I did a fair amount of pedagogy stuff, but the most important thing I learned is that the most effective learning methods are called "eclectic" and aren't really methods at all, just lumpings together of things that seem to work when nothing else does. So I'll add that before bed study, like everything else mentioned on this blog, is not a silver bullet. But if you're looking for something new to try, here's something new.
While I'm dubious about subliminal learning, there is something to be said for learning right before bed, on the way to the calm of sleep and with no new inputs coming up to disturb what you've learned. To that end, I've been reading a lesson or two in the Peace Corps manual right before bed, formulating my own dialogue with the night's material and then listening to the drills for Colloquial Uzbek right before going to sleep. What I've found is that while I don't necessarily remember the material for production, when I look at it later I have little trouble following what it says. More importantly, I find that when I look at words I had had to pick apart to decipher before, the various agglutinative particles pop out at me and grammar explanations that had left me baffled make perfect sense.
The before bed, I think, ties in with the reading aloud bit. In both cases, you're getting your mind set on a pattern that's new but that it's perfectly capable of learning. The reading bit gets your mind and mouth used to what's going on and interested in making it work together; the before bed bit lets you wrap your head around things - again - without your conscious efforts at comprehension getting in the way of what is not logical, per se, but just the way that language works.
When I was in grad school, I did a fair amount of pedagogy stuff, but the most important thing I learned is that the most effective learning methods are called "eclectic" and aren't really methods at all, just lumpings together of things that seem to work when nothing else does. So I'll add that before bed study, like everything else mentioned on this blog, is not a silver bullet. But if you're looking for something new to try, here's something new.
3 Comments:
Interesting idea. I'll have to give that a try. It makes me think of having dreams of German participles dancing around in my head. :P
Sleep is generally a time when we consolidate the days events, and process any information deeper into our brains, so reading / learning something towards bed time can be a good idea as it is fresh for the mind to process.
Subliminal language tapes that repeat words into your ear are largely useless, we offer something a bit different to help you learn a language - our subliminal albums are designed to aid your learning of a new language, to accelerate your learning, and help you to learn a new language easier by stimulating your brain to improve the processing of language based information.
Dan
www.realsubliminal.com
Very interesting, and the sort of honest comments on the topic I was looking for. I have not tried subliminal language learning yet, but your conclusions resonate with a lot of what I've experienced with other mental activities in hypnotic/hypnagogic states. For me, personally, the lack of anxiety sleepiness, reclining, and a comfortable bed can bring facilitate learning. It also facilitates sleep, which is why I don't soley rely on it as a method! You said eclectic, right?
Also, don't feel bad if you didn't absorb those languages subliminally. Anything that gets you to sleep soon and allows you thorough night's rest aids learning of any kind.
Thank you for the post!
p.s. Ever dreamed in the language your studying?
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