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.
Normally, when people learn a language, they try to understand it through the sounds of their native tongue. The more different the foreign language’s sounds and pronunciation are from the native language, the harder the new language will probably be to learn.
But the best linguists master even the trickiest pronunciation much more easily.
Related articles:
People with a 'good ear' for sounds make better language learners (UCL, 14 October 2026)