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

Learning a language effectively requires prolonged exposure to its sounds. Photograph: Dimitrios Symeonidis/Alamy

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.