brains! (Photo credit: cloois)
If you’re thinking that it is way too impossible for you to learn foreign languages, think again. Science can prove that you CAN actually learn foreign languages, and that is based on facts!
As what Telegraph posted, a learner’s brain can learn a new word in less than 15 minutes, according to scientists. Such findings will definitely rob many of the excuse that the learners can’t learn a foreign language, right? Well, think about many other excuses you can comprehend of, but a learner can scientifically learn languages at all. All he needs to do is to listen to a word 160 times over that period.
Yes, the fact was confirmed by Cambridge neuroscientists, as posted by the Telegraph. In fact, the process happens far quicker than previously thought.
It all confirms in an experiment. Dr Yury Shtyrov and his team made the breakthrough after placing electrodes on the heads of 16 healthy volunteers to monitor their brain activity. They firstly recorded the pulses generated when they listened to a familiar word. Then the volunteers were made to listen to a made-up word, over and over again. Initially the brain had to work hard to recognize the new word. But after 160 repetitions over 14 minutes, the new memory traces were “virtually indistinguishable” from those of the already familiar word.
So repetition is the key to aster foreign language learning. To sum up everything, the learner should just practice the target language and he will certainly master it in just a short span of time.
“Getting them to repeat the words would “probably extend the new neural networks” to the part of the brain tasked with speech,” quoting what Dr Yury Shtyrov had said.
So whether you study English abroad or learn Italian, French or Spanish in a foreign language school, don’t ever think that you cannot learn your target language. Our brain is capable of learning it, that’s just how it is. We are naturally incapable of bridging ourselves from our own native language to another.