By Stasie Tillman Last updated: October 28, 2023

Turn Bedtime into Study Time: How to Learn French While You Sleep

What if you could get more out of sleep every night?

What if you could transform your nighttime into French learning time, all from the comfort of your bed?

Well, you can! Sleep is a powerful refresher for the mind and memory—you can take advantage of this by using the right study tools and techniques before you doze off.

Learn French from Bed! 8 Ways to Learn French While You Sleep
Okay, But Does Sleep Learning Really Work?
What Makes Sleep Learning Useful?
And one more thing...

Download: This blog post is available as a convenient and portable PDF that you can take anywhere. Click here to get a copy. (Download)

Learn French from Bed! 8 Ways to Learn French While You Sleep

Use the French Vocabulary CDs from sleeplearning.com

This toolkit is comprised of two CDs with 850 of the most common spoken French words. Through repeated listening to these CDs both while awake and then asleep, you’ll quickly build and reinforce your store of French vocabulary.

The second CD uses binaural beats, which are a sort of auditory illusion created when different frequencies are played in each ear. They’ve been said to create a calming mood and enhance memory retention during sleep.

Try Mind Motivation’s French Sleep Learning Program

This one is similar to the resource above, with the goal of teaching you 450 common French words and phrases. It’s split into “awake tracks” and “sleep tracks” that build off of each other for maximum retention.

The CDs contain subliminal messages (messages designed to pass under the radar of the conscious mind) that influence the subconscious mind to aid in retaining the French words and phrases.

Subscribe to Learn French with Vincent

This YouTube channel wasn’t created specifically for sleep learning, but the host’s clear speech and soothing voice make it perfect for pillow-time passive listening.

Vincent covers a range of language topics including vocabulary, pronunciation and grammar points. He takes his time to slowly enunciate and clarify the words and phrases he uses.

Try watching a video once in the daytime and then listening to the audio again at night, and you’ll get the most out of his lessons.

Learn French Vocabulary from the Sleep Learning YouTube Channel

This resource uses repetition of common French phrases and vocabulary along with binaural beats.

The idea is for the listener to repeat the phrases mentally while drifting asleep. The audio frequency shifts as the video plays to optimize learning before and after sleep.

Listen to FrenchPod101

There’s a podcast for everything these days, right? This one is a favorite among French learners and it’s particularly useful for sleep learning.

For one thing, you could listen to it every night and it would take a long time to run out of podcasts! There are more than 1,000 audio and video lessons available through FrenchPod101, with new ones released every week.

FrenchPod101 will also fit seamlessly into your nighttime regimen, no matter what it is. You can watch video lessons as you brush your teeth and put on pajamas, you can read PDF lesson notes in bed or you can simply play audio lessons from your mobile device as you close your eyes.

When you wake up, use the tailor-made vocabulary building tools and flashcards to see how much you remember!

Play French Music as You Go to Sleep

Music makes everything better! It’s long been regarded as a great tool for learning, and it’s easy to see why from a language perspective. The rhymes and repetition will help you remember new French words as you start singing along!

To incorporate French learning through music before sleep, I’d suggest using music that’s on your level—beginners might try children’s music and advanced speakers might go for some French rap.

Listen to a Recording of Yourself Speaking French

There’s no one we listen to more in life than ourselves. That’s why affirmations are so powerful in retraining our thoughts about ourselves. By listening to yourself speaking French, you’re more inclined to believe that you truly are a competent French speaker!

Take a short recording of yourself reading a French paragraph or a dialogue with another person. Make it your best, so that as you listen to it while you doze off you ensure that you’re adding the proper pronunciation and speech patterns to your long-term memory.

Furthermore, you’ll solidify your self-image as a French speaker!

Take Advantage of Memory-boosting Scents

Specific scents (such as aromatherapy oils) can boost your memory, so take advantage of this before you go to sleep! Studies have found that smelling scents like rosemary, lavender and peppermint may improve concentration and retention of learned material.

Okay, so does that mean lighting a lavender candle at night will instantly put French vocabulary words in your brain? Probably not—but it does mean that you can create a focused, memory-friendly environment for yourself as you’re studying before bed.

Plus, if you smell the same scents when you wake up in the morning, they can help trigger and reinforce your French knowledge from the night before.

FluentU takes authentic videos—like music videos, movie trailers, news and inspiring talks—and turns them into personalized language learning lessons.

You can try FluentU for free for 2 weeks. Check out the website or download the iOS app or Android app.

P.S. Click here to take advantage of our current sale! (Expires at the end of this month.)

Okay, But Does Sleep Learning Really Work?

While you can’t expect to become fluent purely through sleep learning, research shows that it’s an effective way to boost your memory and reinforce language concepts.

For example, this Cerebral Cortex paper indicates that exposure to recently learned foreign vocabulary words during sleep will improve memorization of those words.

And if you know some of the science behind sleep, this makes sense. Researchers say that while you’re asleep, your brain is reviewing the day and creating long-term memories.

This also helps outline some of the limits of sleep learning: you’ll be able to retain more of what you’ve already learned, but you likely won’t be able to, say, pick up a whole new set of vocabulary while you’re asleep.

What Makes Sleep Learning Useful?

One of the biggest advantages of sleep learning is that it makes use of down time. Struggling to find space in your day for French practice? Sleep learning opens up a whole new block of time for you to build your language skills.

You’ll be using your sleep learning resources with your head on the pillow and even soaking up some language while you’re unconscious!

Sleep learning also creates an immersive environment for your language skills to grow. One major hindrance to French fluency is the lack of day-to-day exposure to the language if you don’t live in a French-speaking region.

Immersion is a strategy in which you ensure you’re encountering and using a foreign language constantly. This can be done in a myriad of ways, all of which can allow you to make French become a fixture in your daily life.

Quick fluency can be more feasible when you surround yourself with French at all times you can. By “all times” we can also include your bedtime hours.

So grab your favorite blanket and a cup of chamomile tea—it’s time to sleep like a French learner!

Download: This blog post is available as a convenient and portable PDF that you can take anywhere. Click here to get a copy. (Download)

And one more thing...

If you like learning French on your own time and from the comfort of your smart device, then I'd be remiss to not tell you about FluentU.

FluentU has a wide variety of great content, like interviews, documentary excerpts and web series, as you can see here:

FluentU brings native French videos with reach. With interactive captions, you can tap on any word to see an image, definition and useful examples.

For example, if you tap on the word "crois," you'll see this:

Practice and reinforce all the vocabulary you've learned in a given video with learn mode. Swipe left or right to see more examples for the word you’re learning, and play the mini-games found in our dynamic flashcards, like "fill in the blank."

All throughout, FluentU tracks the vocabulary that you’re learning and uses this information to give you a totally personalized experience. It gives you extra practice with difficult words—and reminds you when it’s time to review what you’ve learned.

Start using the FluentU website on your computer or tablet or, better yet, download the FluentU app from the iTunes or Google Play store. Click here to take advantage of our current sale! (Expires at the end of this month.)