if you're struggling to make progress in a language it's most most probably because you've been trying to learn in a way that goes against your brain i have spent 25 years researching how the brain learns and uses languages i have got a PhD in language education i have studied nine languages myself and I work every day with students who are trying to become fluent in a foreign language as fast as possible so what I am talking about are not just some theoretical framework or ideas coming out from a research paper yes they all come from research but what I'm going to give you today are very practical principles that I use with my students every day and that once you apply them are going to allow you to start progressing much faster and to see results much much faster than you have probably done so far if you've been following some unscientific way of learning languages which to be frank unfortunately that is a lot of the methods that are out there before we start it's very important that I clarify something every single person has a very unique brain we all perceive reality in different ways and that has a direct impact on how we learn how we learn new information and therefore how we learn languages as well now how your brain learns is going to determine what works best specifically for you but that's something quite complex that I cannot explain in a video because everyone is different so it's something that we need to test individually and that we need to create a plan adapted to those results what I'm going to give you today are some very generic principles coming from neuroscience research that are going to allow you to understand a bit better how the brain actually processes languages and what you can do if you want to start making progress much faster you're just going to have to leverage abilities that your brain already has and that you are not using right now and as soon as you start applying them you are going to start seeing much faster results i actually have a test that I have developed for my own students and that it's really really helpful to understand how your brain specifically learns i haven't made it public if you're interested make sure you sign up for my free WhatsApp community because if I decide to make it public that will be the first place where I'm going to announce it so you will be the first to know it but of course that would be way too personalized to be able to cover it in this kind of video so what I'm going to tell you today it's about the seven most unknown and important neuroscientific principles that once you apply them to your language learning can have the highest impact on the results that you're going to see and you definitely don't want to miss the last one because even if a lot of people don't know about this is the one that is going to make the biggest difference by large so let's dive right in principle number one is that you cannot imitate what you cannot perceive and I know this sounds a bit silly but follow me with this if you were born blind and I tell you to imagine the color blue you wouldn't really know what blue looks like because you've never seen blue or if I tell you oh this is blue and this is pink you'd be like okay I don't really know what blue and pink look like even if someone tries to describe it to me it's something you've never seen now something very similar happens with sounds and it's kind of a little bit the opposite from this example I've just given you because when we are babies when we are born our brains are able to hear all the signs of all the languages but because we don't need a lot of those sounds after a year a year and a half babies are going to concentrate on only recognizing the sounds of the language or languages that they hear around them so this means that their brain is going to become suddenly deaf to all the other sounds of all the other languages that when you are born you're still able to hear but after a year a year and a half you're not able to do it anymore and you will not be able to hear them anymore ever again in your life unless you get specific training to rehear them again now you might be thinking like okay how is this important yes this is important because even if a lot of people tell you you just need to listen to the language a lot and then you will just pick it up yes there are people whose brains are a bit more open for the acoustic part and they're going to be able to naturally identify those new sounds and imitate them but a lot of students like a lot the immense majority of students are not able to do this on their own they need someone to point them towards the sounds that are different in the target language versus their mother tongue and who teaches them how to articulate these new sounds how to make these new sounds with their own voice and if you miss this first principle it means you're going to struggle a lot with the listening skills understanding people in the language and speaking with a neutral accent that is easy to understand for anyone now what can you do about this yes you need more exposure but you need the right kind of exposure with the right kind of guidance that it's going to help you identify those sounds and learn how to imitate them you will probably never be able to hear those sounds as well as a baby that has grown up with that language as the native language and that's usually why we say that the best way to get a native accent is to learn the language when you were very young even if the big blog happens around the 12 18 months that part of the brain that recognizes and imitates sounds is still fairly active throughout childhood until 10 12 years old so that's why we say that but if that's too late for you no worries what you need to do is to make sure that you're going to have sufficient exposure guided exposure and guided practice to be able to recognize those sounds and make those sounds so it's not impossible but you need to know this principle and you need to know the kind of exercises you have to do if you want to leverage it and be able to understand and speak the language much faster and with less pain that you're probably having to go through right now and this takes us nicely into principle number two which is that your brain hears words when you're reading even if you are not reading aloud now because the human being was able to listen and to speak much much much much earlier than it was able to read or write the brain does not have a direct mechanism that allows your brain to read something and immediately interpret it in the language center what happens is that when you read something your brain is going to rroot that information through the acoustic system and then from there it's going to get into the language system why is this important when you're learning a foreign language because if you start reading a lot without knowing how to pronounce all those foreign words that have foreign sounds that your brain has not been trained to understand or to imitate your brain it's just going to make up sounds for those words and of course it's going to be sounds that are going to be similar to your mother tongue this means that all of those words that you are learning from reading but that you have never actually heard are going to be recorded in your brain with the wrong pronunciation so you are making a huge effort to create a lot of con connections in your brain that at some point you're going to have to undo because that is not the right way to pronounce the word so at some point someone is going to have to teach you how to say that word correctly now you see the problem right if you want to progress faster what you should always always always do is to listen to new words you can either just work with audio or text materials which today they are very easy to find you can work with texts as well but just make sure you listen to the words just put it through one of these like AI readers that are going to read it for you with a more or less robotic voice but hopefully a kind of native accent that's going to be really really helpful and then if you just find random words that are not part of a text what you should just do is ask Google like how do you pronounce this word in the language and I found that works quite well but it's really really important that you're not writing down or like recording any word that you don't know exactly how it is pronounced so what I recommend when you learn a new word is that you are recording not just how it's written but also the pronunciation and you're trying to repeat and repeat quite a few times 10 12 15 times just to try to create that muscle memory that hopefully even if you're not getting the sounds 100% correct it's going to help you actually remember better what it sounds like and this brings us directly to principle number three which is that your brain speaks while you are writing it's for exactly the same reason that when you are reading your brain is going through the acoustic part that when you are trying to write your brain is having to go through the acoustic part as well but what is interesting is that when you write your brain is creating language so your brain is activating the same language creation mechanisms that you would use when you speak this means that if you spend some time trying to write you're going to be flexing those muscles that create language in your brain you're going to be practicing your pronunciation because it still has to go through the acoustic system and then of course you're going to be writing it down we know from research that these type of tasks are really really helpful to improve your fluency when you are speaking because you're going to be creating language at a much slower pace than you would do when you speak but you are still activating the same mechanisms in your brain what is really good exercise as well is that as you are writing you try to speak at the same time you try to articulate those words so that you are adding all of that muscle memory of which muscles you need to activate to pronounce those words and same exercise as before if you can't remember how to pronounce a word that you want to write you go and you check the pronunciation you never ever leave a word that you don't know how to pronounce without checking what's the right pronunciation and if you're interested in this topic I've got another video that I'm just going to put here and in the description where I explain how you could be improving your speaking skills through scaffolded writing practice so if you are struggling to speak in the language I encourage you to check that video next now going back to our list we've got principle number four and this one is more of a reminder that speaking is an extremely complex task we think it's probably the most complex skill that the human being is able to perform and speaking activates a lot of regions in our brain if you see a scan of a brain while it's speaking you see there are like so many areas that are firing up all the time and we used to think there were two different areas that were in charge of like understanding language and producing language but now we know it's actually much more flexible than that and there are a lot of areas that are firing up at the same time when you are trying to speak in a language including your mother tongue when you're doing it in your mother tongue it's a bit easier right but when you do it in a foreign language there is a huge cognitive load it's like a lot of brain bandwidth going into doing all of these things that are happening in your brain that is why speaking a foreign language it's so so difficult because your brain is already like 80% of the capacity is taken and then ideally you would need another 100% just for the language part but you only have one brain and you only have like 100% capacity so I just want you to be gentle to yourself when you are trying to speak in a foreign language and you are struggling with it remember the cognitive load that we call the number of processes that are happening in parallel in your brain are huge the same happens with your computer right if you have a computer a normal computer like mine and you have like a thousand taps open and the camera recording and the mic and everything going on your computer at some point is going to crash now that's exactly what happens to your brain when you are trying to make it to speak a foreign language too fast too early you cannot find the words you cannot find the grammar you can't remember that expression and it's just like so yes that's exactly that's because you only have one brain you have to fit everything into the bandwidth that you've got and it's just extremely extremely difficult so what can you do to remediate this you have to scaffold your speaking and this is why writing beforehand it's often very very helpful for students because it allows you to automate a lot of those language processes so that when you have to speak at the same time it becomes slightly easier you can do a lot of scaffolded practice as well where you have like guided exercises a lot of textbooks have those where they give you some sentences and you can just repeat some sentences and then you add a little bit from your own with your own words so that's also very good at the beginning to try to ease you into that more complex task of speaking a foreign language without thinking about it but just be gentle to yourself and remember speaking on its own is extremely complex speaking a foreign language is even more complex and literally what happens is that your brain doesn't have enough bandwidth to do both at the same time so at some point it just collapses and this takes us nicely to principle number five which is about how the brain learns we know from research or at least this is what we believe right now because there's some recent research that is showing something slightly different really interesting i'll explain that in another video but we think how the brain learns it's by creating connections between neurons and these neurons are going to briefly connect and then they're going to disconnect and then when you are exposed to a new word a new expression again they're going to try to connect again but as long as this link is not essential for the brain and it's not repeatedly needed the brain is not going to keep that connection the brain is just going to let that connection fade out because it has a million things to think about and to remember so if there is one word that you see once and you don't see ever again then there's no way it's going to remember it there'll be some memory of it because there was a very tiny connection so when you see that word again you might be like "Ha I remember this word i don't know what it means." But then someone will tell you what it means and then the connection will be made again and then the next time you see it you might remember what it means but you may not remember how to use it or when to use it so every time you are trying to do that it's like the connection is getting reinforced and we know what we are looking for is for those connections to solidify and become very stable and very robust because that is when that language has been automated and has been kind of moved into the long-term memory and it can be used automatically without thinking too much about it now how do we manage to do that again research shows that spaced repetition is extremely helpful especially compared to road repetition so road repetition would be the old lists of words that you had to learn at school space repetition it means that we're going to look at some number of words now and then there going to be some that you already know and some that you know less well so in a set period of time maybe like it really depends because that's what is a spaced repetition is going to be more and more spaced as time goes by but for maybe after 10 minutes they're going to show you those difficult words again and then after 20 minutes and then after half an hour now there's a lot of research in that and I'll record another video looking into that in more detail what we know lately is that maybe the distance between those learning sprints is not as important as the fact that you are doing those tiny learning sprints with a certain frequency so you are rebuilding those connections in the brain and that it's already going to have much better results than trying to learn a word by heart or randomly working with flashcards that are not even adapted to what you need to learn or to how your brain learns now there are also other tasks that you can scaffold to help you with this practice and I've got a video specifically on that i'll put it in the description so you can check it later on if you want it looks at the four stages of skill development and how we apply them to language learning and then I also have my three-stage fluency tracker that it's completely free you can download it from the description and it's going to make it really easy for you to track the words and the expressions and the rules and how you move them from those first connections when you see them for the first time and you can barely understand them to being able to use them automatically and naturally as part of your speech or in a conversation and this takes us to principle number six which is that learning and connections solidify while you sleep and while you rest and we know from research that especially in contexts where there is very intensive exposure to the language like immersion programs if you wait for a few weeks and you test the students at the end of these three four weeks of rest the language will have solidified and their results in their tests is going to be higher than it was right after they finished the program we also know when you practice just before going to sleep you're going to have a better retention you're going to be able to remember better especially anything that involves your motor system so involves your muscles or procedural knowledge that we call something that you have to do so this means that when we test it we see that after a few days you're going to remember much better the things that you practice just before going to bed than those that you practice maybe in the middle of the afternoon or even in the morning so this is a trick that I don't hear a lot of students using but it's super super helpful to know that 10 minutes of practice before going to bed are going to have a much stronger long-term effect on your learning that those same 10 minutes done in the morning so why would you not want to do those in the evening if they can give you better results and then principle number seven and for me this is probably the most important one because even if it has to do with the brain it's a bit at the interface between neuroscience and psychology so somehow it just gets lost in translation and not many people talk about it and it's the emotional side of trying to speak a foreign language and we know from research that emotions block part of your brain they actually block what we call is your executive function which it's the part in charge of planning what you're going to say how you're gonna say trying to find the words when you are really stressed out especially if you have a lot of anxiety there are chemical things that happen in your brain that are going to block that part of your brain and this is why you just freeze when you are speaking sometimes it's due to the anxiety because the anxiety is blocking a part of your brain that is in charge of planning what you're going to say next or finding the right word and that feeling of freezing like I literally like blank like I can't I can't think anymore yes that's exactly what's happening it's like there is a curtain of chemical things that have blocked the part of the brain that it's going to allow you to continue speaking so if you are suffering from this it's something you need to learn to control there are a lot of techniques that we can learn to keep anxiety under control so that's definitely something we can work on and that's something I do tend to have to work on quite a lot with my clients so it doesn't block your ability to communicate and to speak especially in a foreign language because the anxiety in a foreign language is of course higher than when you're speaking in your own language but I'd like to finish on a positive note and just to say that emotions are also really really important in learning if you think how you learned your mother tongue it was loaded with emotions with feelings with how people made you feel and how you felt about these other people so when you are learning a language it's also very very helpful to try to attach emotions to things so for example when you learn a new word or a new expression something that works really well is to try to create a memory with that try to create a sentence that applies to you to your life that has some emotional load in it because we are going to remember much better the words that we learn that have an emotional load that words that we just learn in isolation without any emotional attachment to them so that's a trick that you can start using today and that is very easy is whenever you find a new word or a new expression don't just write it down and think okay right I have to learn it think about the situation in your own life where that word or expression would be relevant and concentrate on the emotions that you would have in that situation and then try to associate those emotions with that word and I can guarantee that those words you learn like that are going to be much easier to remember that's why reading stories so powerful in language learning because they make you feel something so you start recording the words associated with the feelings and the emotions that you felt for the character in the story now these are the seven most important principles for neuroscience that I think when students start applying them to the learning they see a huge difference what I recommend is that you make a list of those that you find most interesting and that you are not applying yet you start using them for your learning try using them for again three four weeks is the minimum we need to see some actual progress and then let me know in the comments what differences you felt did it really make a difference i apply all of these principles with my students with my clients so I do know how powerful they are and I am excited to think that if you're watching this and you apply them you could be experiencing similar progress and similar results in just a few weeks from now so don't hesitate to try them out and then let me know in the comments if you really felt that difference i really really want to know now if you are interested to learn a bit more about how your brain specifically learns languages and what you can do to help your own unique brain learn languages faster I have a test that I use with my students and that I am exploring how to share it with a wider public than just my own private students so make sure you join my free WhatsApp community because if I decide to make it public and I manage from the technical point of view because it's quite a complex test and people inside the group will be the first ones to have access to that test so if this is something you're interested in or you're curious about I recommend that you join the community today before you forget i leave the link in the description it's completely free and it's actually quite fun and you can ask questions that then I answer in different videos and I share some insights every week so you will definitely enjoy it and if you are struggling to make progress in the language I recommend that you watch this video next because I will break down how to get out of the intermediate plateau or of any learning plateau that you are experiencing i'll give you my entire blueprint and it's really the next step that you need after you've watched this video to start making progress faster than ever before