can you learn a language while walking or commuting?

what driving leaves for the ear

in 2001 david strayer and william johnston put people in a driving simulator and gave them other things to do at the same time. listening to a radio broadcast or to a book on tape did not disrupt their driving. nor did repeating back words as they heard them. what did disrupt it was a version of the task where drivers had to produce a new word in answer to each one they heard, and the harder the driving, the worse that interference became. a real phone conversation, handheld or hands-free, doubled the rate at which drivers missed traffic signals.

the authors' explanation is about attention rather than hands or ears. a conversation pulls the mind into a context of its own, away from the road. hearing speech does not, at least not in their tests, while generating it does.

the study has limits worth stating. it was a simulator, not a motorway, and it measured the driving, not what anyone kept from the audio. it says nothing about how much of the book on tape the drivers remembered. what it does give a commuter is a line to draw. audio you only listen to sat on the safe side of it. audio that asks you to answer, to build a sentence or to hold up your end of an exchange sat on the other.

the street has its own sound

walking has a different problem. david schwebel and his colleagues put 138 college students in front of a virtual street and had them cross it while talking on the phone, texting, listening to music, or doing nothing else. the students listening to music, like the ones texting, were more likely to be hit by a virtual car than students crossing undistracted, and the phone group showed no such clear increase.

the authors think music did its damage through the ears rather than the mind. listening to music is less mentally demanding than a conversation, they note, but it covers the sounds a pedestrian relies on, and the listeners may simply not have heard what was coming. the effect was small, and it was a simulation. still, it is a reason to keep the volume low, keep one ear open, or pause at the kerb. a language track is speech, not music, but through headphones it can cover the traffic too.

can moving help?

there is a more hopeful result, with a caveat attached. in a study published in 2017, fengqin liu and colleagues taught forty new english words, with pictures, to chinese university students who had basic english. half of them pedalled a stationary bike at a steady, moderate pace while the words were shown and spoken. the other half sat in a chair. over eight weekly sessions, the cyclists did better, both at matching words to pictures and at judging whether sentences made sense.

the authors are careful about it. their participants were beginners, the activity was cycling at a measured heart rate, not walking to a station, and the words were on a screen as well as in the ear. they also say the study needs a comparison group doing something else enjoyable, such as listening to music, before the benefit can be put down to movement rather than novelty or mood. it is one study, and it supports no more than a possibility: being in motion is not the enemy of taking words in.

commute-sized listening

those three studies point to the same design for a commute.

choose listening, not answering. if the audio you use asks you to pause and respond aloud, save that part for when you are sitting still, and keep the moving time for material you only have to follow.

choose short, self-standing pieces. a ride gets interrupted by stations, crossings and other people. if each line or phrase makes sense on its own, a missed one costs you that one line, not the thread of a long story.

match the length to the journey. something that ends as you arrive is easier to come back to tomorrow than something you abandon halfway every day.

and check it at the other end. as you get off or walk in, try to recall one thing you heard and what it meant. if you can, the commute is doing something. if the whole ride has gone by as sound, turn the difficulty down, or give the listening a quieter stretch of the route.

six songs for one ride

driftspeak is subtitles for your ears, spoken audio made for the attention a commute leaves over. playlist #178 is six songs about wanting someone, in four languages: spanish, korean, french and italian, about twenty-one minutes in all. each line comes in its language and then in english. the lines also grow in place. in telepatía, the first track, the three-word "hay luna llena" ("there's a full moon") returns with tonight added to it, and then with a word asking you to look. a line that short survives a station announcement.

on the next walk you take, listen to a sample of playlist #178, where the first three tracks have free samples, at a volume that leaves the street audible, and see how much of telepatía is still with you when you arrive.