Stop making sense: focus on sounds to help learn a language, study suggests

Research shows that the best linguists process unfamiliar foreign speech sounds more like non-speech sounds If you want to get really good at French, Arabic or Hungarian, don’t start with rote learning vocabulary and grammar, focus on how they sound instead, research suggests.

A new study of how humans learn modern languages has found that the brains of the most talented linguists hear foreign terms as random noise, not words.

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