Duolingo, Sleep, and Programming

So, I know I'm going to get ripped to shreds on here, but I'm going to go ahead anyways.

Anyways, I heard a while ago that you can reinforce what you know in your sleep. Some people say 'learn while you sleep' or whatever, or the multiple youtube videos and whatnot 'learn X language while you sleep' and that's a bunch of pooh, and anyone here worth their salt knows that. However, studies done have shown that listening to vocab you already know can reinforce it in your brain. (Already know, not learning new stuff. This will only be about reinforcing what you know. Repetition, Repetition, Repetition)

Ever have a dream where there's an alarm or someone is saying something, you wake up and your alarm is going off or someone is saying something? It's kind of like that. While asleep, your brain is in a 'passive listening' mode. It's that idea, the idea that your brain is still listening, even passively. The idea is if you are learning new vocab, or even reinforcing old ones you know but are rusty on, having them said to you while asleep can strengthen that neural connection in your brain. I believe part of the study showed you can only have the word you're learning, not the translation, I think, but I may be slightly off in my memory. Long story short, when I go to sleep, and if I hear the word 'la porte' in french, my mind will passively go 'la porte.... that's uhhh.... door..... yeah.......' and just relax, but that pathway is strengthened.

One problem is that if you hear vocabulary that you don't know, it goes too fast, too stressful, you hear translations (especially wrong ones), etc, it can all reduce the benefit to nil. It stresses out your brain a little bit while sleeping, and the relaxed passive strengthening is lost. Another problem is it's hard to find a YouTube video to listen to at night that will actually work, and contains a good portion of what I know, and nothing I don't. I've been studying it for 6 years now. Or even Chinese and Japanese, my vocabulary is very small and very specific, and no YouTube video will have that exact.

Here comes Duolingo

We all love I'm being forced to say that at knife point, please send help, Duo has me hostage Duolingo. It's a great gamified learning system, and when coupled with other decent resources, can help you get pretty far in a language (B1, B2 (?) if I remember correctly, but it all depends on the learner), because Duo isn't great at teaching conjugation, but excels with vocab and sentence structure. Once you get the hang of something, Duo is amazing at getting that skill honed. I love it. Plus, while you're studying on the language, Duo has this nice little feature, Words. Not too useful to look at for the learner in the overall learning, but cool to look at, see what's strong, how many words you know, etc etc. However, this list has Only words you've seen. Let's link that back up to what we were talking about. If we can get a nice, calm, relaxing voice to read off words you know in a slow and relaxed pace, off of this list, then there's a good chance you could gain some benefit. Plus, Duo, wonderful Duo, even shows how strong the word is in your mind. Granted, if you use other sites or resources, you'll know more, and things will be stronger, but just in general, we can even take into consideration how the strength of a word impacts your brain making that connection while you sleep. I'm studying new Chinese vocab for my class, and rn, even though I reviewed, some of the words I have not memorized yet. I know they're in my chapter, but I do not know what they mean, and I cannot say them off the top of my head. So hearing them while I sleep would be useless, because I don't even know them while I'm awake, but a word I'm decent with in Chinese would be great, so family, person, french, food, etc.

I've made a few comments and posts relating to this idea on the forums, and while they got a few upvotes and comments, never much thought, and overall I think it was seen as a 'cool but overall not as useful idea'.

Here comes programming

So, idek if it would be legal (please tell me if it is or not), but writing a code that you can use while logged into Duolingo that takes your word list, copies them with their strength, and them compiles an auditory list for you. Getting audio of words isn't a concern of mine right now.

From there you can have the words repeat, choose whether to strength strong, decent, or somewhat weak, etc, while you listen.

I feel that this kind of program would be useful for reinforcement during sleep, yes, but also for transit, relaxing, etc, because you already know the words, you just need to passively listen to them, translate them, understand them, and because you already know them, some at a decent level, it's going to take less work than learning a new word or phrase.

Overall, yeah, I get the benefit may be minimalist, but if there is a benefit, then I, at least, want it. If I can do something to improve my learning in my downtime (study of course, but in this case I mean sleep, transit, eat, etc) then I want to take that. If I improve something by only 1% each day, only 1%, then by 68 days I'll be at about 50% improvement (if it compounds, just purely from a mathematics standpoint). Even a small benefit, even a small betterment of my, of our skills is worth it to take. We don't live forever, and we need to make the most of each day, and I would love to make even my sleep a studying tool (beyond just resting)

Well, rip me to shreds I guess. Either way, I hope you have a wonderful day/night, because YOU are amazing, and I hope you feel like you're making leaps and bounds with your language!

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