Can You Wake Up Fluent in a Foreign Language?
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🛏️😳Is it possible to wake up one morning and be fluent in a language you didn’t know? Stranger things have happened! Stick around while we investigate these wild stories of instant fluency.
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⏱ TIMESTAMPS:
0:00 – Intro
0:23 – “I sounded like I was from Transylvania.”
1:13 – Aussie Wakes up Chinese
2:07 – The Kid from Georgia
2:44 – French Matthew McConaughey
3:51 – Brand New Chinese Accent
7:03 – Is It All Lies?
8:23 – The Science
📜 SOURCES & ATTRIBUTIONS:
🎬 Video Clips:
Waking Up As A French-Speaking Matthew McConaughey After A Coma | Bizarre ER
Karen Butler.mp4
Woman speaks with four different accents after mystery brain injury | SWNS
Aussie Wakes Up From Coma Speaking Mandarin | SBS The Feed
Stop 4: Melbourne's Swanston Street《Ben Tours Melbourne》第四站: 墨尔本的斯旺斯顿街 《小明玩转墨尔本》
Teen Wakes Up From Coma Fluent in Spanish
Matthew McConaughey reveals origin of "Alright Alright Alright"
Explainer: Why these women woke up with a foreign accent | 60 Minutes Australia
Funny Disabilities | Tom Segura Stand Up Comedy | "Disgraceful" on Netflix
The women who woke up with foreign accents | 60 Minutes Australia
Waking Up With A Southern Accent. Andy Forrester – Full Special
Man wakes up in hospital speaking fluent Chinese – World's Weirdest Events: Episode 8 – BBC Two
🌍Bet you can’t understand these accents! 👉🏼https://youtu.be/7SJ-wTR2H6M
What a super interesting story and video topic. Thanks for sharing Olly!!
This is really a fascinating topic. I wish you could make more videos on this. I was thinking if this Chinese speaking guy also got fluency in writing and reading?
I think it says in the video that he wrote a note to his family in Chinese and the nurse translated it for them. How fluently, who knows? He had learned a bit of Chinese, but his post-injury Chinese was much better than it had ever been – i.e., when it was the only language available to him, his brain seemed to be accessing language that had not been easily accessible before the injury. It shows there’s more in there than we think there is!
I had a really bad brain injury when I was in third grade when I got hit by a car and sadly I didn’t pick up no accent because I didn’t know any other languages nor did I speak any other. However, I’m now learning Russian and it would be so cool if my brain would kick in the Russian when I woke up tomorrow morning.
this is very interesting. You know, I once I saw something in a psychology class, where a woman was speaking a different language. It was just really bizarre. These things do happen, and it is very interesting. I can’t remember what psychology class it was, or what the name of the woman was, but it was just really bizarre. It’s pretty interesting, how being in a coma can change your life. I heard a story about a girl who was in a coma for 20 years. Because she hadn’t spoken for that long, her muscles were dormant. I forget her name. Her first name was Sarah. She was from Canada. She was dubbed the real sleeping beauty.
The surest way to wake up fluent in a second language is to go to sleep fluent in a second language.
YES.
It worked for me. I woke up fluent in 3 languages. (To clarify – going to sleep fluent in them worked for me.)
I can relate in a couple of ways. First, when I was in high school, I had a head injury, with a concussion. I ended up with some memory loss, in a strange way: I’d be singing a song, and I’d get to a verse, and I knew that I knew the verse, but couldn’t recall it, and if I tried to recall those memories, I got a strong headache. Headaches abated and my ability to form and recall memories have improved over the decades.
I do code-switch freely; I’m studying Japanese, and my inner dialog switches between Japanese and English and sometimes both at the same time. Or, if I’m not doing much else, my brain just decides to practice Japanese words I’ve been having trouble with. And, after waiting in line at the pharmacy and studying Japanese flashcards on my phone, I unthinkingly responded in Japanese: “I have one prescription ready for you.” “はい…Oh, sorry, yes, yes…”
And I definitely agree on the confidence angle. I take an in-person Japanese class with a native speaker on Zoom every week for about a year now (my brain just reminded me that in Japanese that’s a テレベかいぎ…a television meeting, new vocabulary…). We’re learning some new grammar, and it’s a little complex, and nobody was really volunteering to speak, so I spoke up…and I did well at it. I could tell that my brain was working hard, but I got it right and sensei was impressed. Trevor Noah had a clip where he said that that one of the keys to getting good at speaking a language is to just speak without being self conscious. Little children who are learning language don’t worry if they’re going to be right, they just speak.
During my doctoral studies, I had continually wanted to experiment using hypnosis to see if a second language can be retrieved from someone who had studied one, but had forgotten it. I never did find a hypnotherapist willing to work with me on this.
Unfortunately I’m pretty sure those languages are usually pruned. Would be awesome if possible though.
@ImagineHeroism I doubt that learned languages can be truly pruned out. People who have totally forgotten a language they once knew, say, in childhood, will mostly learn it faster when they start studying it later in life.
My high functioning autistic son learned first Finnish from me and English from his father. We then moved to Finland for 5 years and I switched to speaking only English at home, but he continued learning Finnish at childcare and at first year at school. Children he spoke with in communal garden could speak English and Finnish.
When we moved back to a small town in England all the children were bullied as foreigners as they quickly rejected Finnish, even refused to understand me. My autistic son, then 7, even went into a rage, so I gave up a losing battle. By the time they finished school none of them could speak Finnish.
But two of the youngest children, nearing their 30′ got interested in learning Finnish because of potential job prospects: they both learned Finnish independently watching YouTube and reading websites explaining the grammar- only very rarely would my autistic one (who lived with me) ask me about some word or confirmation that he understood a simple sentence.but both children learned remarkably well – even my autistic son, who struggled with French and German which areare related. Finnish gramnar is much more complicated)
I’ve been trying to learn Italian for 2 years, I would give anything to wake up and be able to speak it fluently…maybe I just need to fall on my head lol
Sameee
Learn a second language, in case you have the misfortune to suffer a head injury. So that there’s something for your brain to find, when it looks for a non-native language.
I’d love to know whether people in this situation still understand their native language, even though unable to speak it, or whether they have to re-learn it as a foreign language. It looks like they do still understand it, as the stories here are more about the problems other people have in understanding them.
Their native language starts coming back to them as their head heals.
I had a patient come to my ER in the USA for this! She woke up with a “Russian” accent. Her family had to help convince the staff that that wasn’t her normal speech.
This is fascinating! Can I wake up speaking Spanish, please?!
What’s interesting about Ben’s story (Australian who spoke Chinese) is that his nurse was Chinese, as she could translate his writings to the parents. Perhaps, when he was unconscious, the nurse spoke or used Chinese around him. I wouldn’t be surprised if other nurses were Chinese, too – I live in Australia, we are a very multicultural country! The Sydneysider who adopted a Central European / Balkan accent may have prior familarity with say, the Croatian diaspora (many are in my city, Sydney). Likewise, the football player from Georgia would’ve had familarity with Spanglish and Spanish. Interestingly, these examples came from Anglophone countries where languages can blend together. I’ve had dentists who speak English to me, but when talking to each other, go to Chinese. This also explains why the languages / accents adopted, share geographic or linguistic familarity with English, as notable with the one who spoke in a Norman accent.
I’ve never studied science past year 10. But I do think I’m onto something, here. Having languages spoken to you does influence your brain!
I wouldn’t call Chinese linguistic or geographic familiarity. It’s pretty far from Australia. But if you mean that he studied Chinese before the event and probably consumed a lot more Chinese media, say, Chinese films dubbed in English, then that makes sense.
@ClaptrapThat’s true, but the average Australian (at least in Sydney and Melbourne) are exposed, quite frequently, to the Chinese language. I’m wondering if this influenced his eventual brain condition.
My uncle’s cousin was kicked in the head by a horse at his job and he woke up only being able to speak Spanish and they had to have a translator every time they went to visit him. Sadly, he passed away from the injury, but it was so fasinating at the time!
I have had the reverse experience to this, in a way. Back in my youth I learned Welsh to the level where I could hold a basic conversation off the cuff … but then I had a pretty bad (as in near-fatal) motorcycle crash that involved a couple of very heavy hits to the head. This has had several bad effects as my brain healed and remapped itself around the damaged bits but the one I resent the most is that my Welsh was erased. I describe the feel of it as being like when you first have a tooth extracted in that you know there used to be something there but whenever you search for it it is now gone. Oddly I could recall a list of nouns still but that was it.
When I revisited learning Spanish some 18 years after having had it in high school for 3 years, I was surprised by how much I could remember once I started exposing myself to it again. I likened it to my brain being forced to go down into the basement and bring up boxes of Spanish words that had been packed away like forgotten Christmas decorations. Once I let the brain know I was going to be needing that stuff again, it just started bringing it up in bulk, so I didn’t have to struggle to remember.
After about a year, I got busy doing other things and stopped learning Spanish, but I didn’t feel bad about it, knowing that I could resurrect it pretty quickly at any time.
Fast forward another 5 years and I have started learning Polish. About a year or so into learning it, however–right at the point where I have gotten a tutor and I’m trying to speak–I suddenly start recalling Spanish words instead of Polish words–including some I have probably not been exposed to in nearly 25 years. Polish words I knew quite well would suddenly disappear and I could only come up with the Spanish word. Then there was that distressing moment when I was actually ordering something from the Mexican restaurant in Spanish, replied automatically to a question with “tak” (“yes” in Polish), then, when I tried to clarify what I meant to the confused lady on the phone, found I could not only not remember the word for “yes” in Spanish, but I also couldn’t remember it in English.
I told my tutor it was like my brain had a shelf for foreign languages and it did not separate Polish from Spanish; it just stored them all jumbled up together and when I reached for a word, it pulled the first translation off the shelf, regardless of what language it was actually in.
Moving on another couple of years, though, and now my brain is fully switched over to Polish and if I try to think of something in Spanish, the first word that comes to my mind is Polish.
So I can absolutely believe that if people have head trauma, their brains can swap the words in the basement for the words it normally keeps cached upstairs for easy access. Brains are wonderful and mysterious things.
Love this!
I’ve had a similar experience. I started learning French and Portuguese on my own as a teenager, but completely abandoned them for the next 20 years. Now studying Italian, I often get frustrated because a phrase comes out my mouth that’s somehow all three languages. Certain Portuguese words are really strong in me, and those ones just bully the Italian equivalent out the way every time!! What’s more, sometimes when I’m speaking my other native tongue, Afrikaans, either French or Portuguese will get in the way. In the moment, it feels like the long-ago word is standing in front of the Afrikaans one and deliberately blocking it, like a bodyguard. Yet I can’t speak French or Portuguese if I actually try to. So I love your analogy of the basement full of boxes of foreign words. 😉
As far as fluency goes, this generally means you haven’t reached a high enough level to say you’ve truly acquired the language. BUT I think there’s more to it, because these days I’m forgetting how to say things in English, too!
I totally get this. I have studied both Spanish and Italian and they are very hard to separate my mind.
I spent two years living in Germany, but whilst I was there unfortunately did not have time to do any lessons, I was working in an office where everyone spoke English, and was usually around predominantly English speakers when I was out socialising. I also didn’t watch any local TV in that time. After I came back to the UK I started dreaming in German, and whilst I still can’t really speak it proficiently I can form basic conversational phrases and have a far better comprehension of spoken German in movies etc than I had when I was there.
interesting!
I met someone that this had happened to. Grew up speaking American English, had some kind of brain injury (this was over ten years ago so I don’t remember the exact story or nature of the injury) but after that she had a total New Zealand accent. I was stunned… and also a bit embarrassed as I’d asked her where she’s from only to have her tell me the brain injury story 🙁
I think if I could sound like native with a gereral accent, I think it would be a fair exchange for forgetting my native tongue. I rarely speak it anyway and the only person that would struggle to understand me would be my father. (But I would be upset if my brain picked any other of the languages I have dabbled with.)
I dreamed in a foreign language I was learning. I was at beginner stage but for some reason was able to read and understand the news article that appeared in my dream fluently. It was a news article I had never seen before.