DOWNLOAD THE FREE LiSTNR APP
Multi ethnic university adult student couple learning languages together in a study hall

Is learning a language about to become a breeze?

When considering learning a language, there are often three avenues one can take; the much-adored Duolingo, hiring a tutor, or travelling to the country of origin and aiming for complete immersion. 

For the regular person, who doesn’t have a spare 6 months free to travel Spain, it can take upwards of 750 hours to reach a degree of proficiency.

This is, of course, assuming that a committed, sustained approach is established and a tier-one language is chosen.  

Even then, fluency is hard to achieve.

Time constraints, costs and inefficient learning techniques can prove to be considerable hurdles on the quest to become bilingual. 

However, one group of Australian researchers says virtual reality and AI could soon be the solution to our language-woes. 

One of the researchers, Brodie McGee from the University of Southern Queensland, joined Bension Siebert on Tuesday’s episode of The Briefing to discuss how this new approach could be supercharging the process of learning a new language.  

Stay up-to-date on the latest news with The National Briefing – keeping you in the loop with news as it hits:

In a bid to dispel any of the guilt that one may feel about their language-learning attempts, McGee emphasises the difficulty of the venture.

“The amount of time that we’re actually immersed in the language is really difficult,” he says. 

“That opportunity to immerse yourself, it’s just one of these really difficult things to get into your life.”

The current model of learning, which McGee argues prioritises a rote learning structure, fails to consider languages as extensions of culture. 

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by LiSTNR Newsroom (@listnrnewsroom)

“When you actually go to a bar or you go to a cafe and you want to have a conversation with someone, it’s those types of things that actually give us common relationships between people. And that’s always been missing in the past when we’ve been trying to teach languages,” Mcgee says. 

RELATED:   This Is Why Tabloid Journalism Is So Dangerous

This line of thought is what led Mcgee to incorporate VR headsets into the classrooms he used to teach in. Many of the children had never left the regional town they lived in, and McGee witnessed a keen interest by the students in the varying cultures and people they were simulating. 

It was this experience that influenced McGee to blend the two experiences; language learning and VR headsets. 

“If you put a headset on someone and put them in an fMRI, their brain lights up as if they’re actually in that environment, in that immersive environment, as if they’d actually gone over to the country,” McGee says.

“So it started my research kind of rolling from there, that if we know that the brain kind of acts as if it’s in place when you’re using a VR headset, then surely there must be a crossover here with language learning”. 

Currently, there are two forms of VR for language in circulation; synchronous and asynchronous. 

The asynchronous method McGee likens as the VR equivalent of Duolingo, which leans on a ‘predetermined list of answers and responses.’

Whereas, synchronous learning would replicate a classroom in-situation.

“That classroom could be the Louvre, it could be a cafe, it could actually be the in-position place, that immersive environment that we’re trying to recreate,” McGee says. 

So, would you use a VR headset to learn your next language?

Subscribe to The Briefing, Australia’s fastest-growing news podcast on Listnr today. The Briefing serves up the latest news headlines and a deep dive into a topic affecting you. All in under 20 minutes.