S1E3 Infosode 3: Inside Your Brain: How Language Processing Actually Works - Breakdown of Neuroscience

In this infosode, we take a clear, science-based look at how your brain processes language: how sounds are decoded, how meaning is built, how prediction works, how emotions and memory influence understanding, and why speaking feels harder than listening. You’ll learn why new languages feel overwhelming — and why that’s completely normal. 🐝 Contact: DM @beee.jam

Episode Transcript

(00:00):
Hi, and welcome to the BEEE German podcast.

(00:03):
In today's infosode, I try to break down, as good as I
can, how the brain processes language learning.
the first thing you must know is your brain doesn't have one language center.
Instead, it uses a network, a team of specialized areas that work together

(00:23):
incredibly fast… Let's walk through what happens when you hear, understand and produce
language… When someone speaks, your ears send the sound waves to the auditory cortex
, which lives in the temporal lobe.
This area analyzes the sound pattern.

(00:44):
Is this speech or noise? What are the rhythm and the melody?
And where are the boundaries between syllables?
It's basically the sound decoder.
This means, if you are not familiar with words in a foreign language, it's very likely for
those words to be filtered out immediately, and
therefore, they won't get processed any further.

(01:08):
But let's say the words get through and… it's recognized as speech… Next,
the signal goes to a region called Wernicke's area, which helps you understand meaning.
It answers questions like, what word did I just hear?
What does this word mean?

(01:29):
And does this make sense?
This area is your dictionary and grammar interpreter… A huge part of language processing
also is prediction… Your brain doesn't wait passively.
It constantly guesses what will come next.

(01:50):
For example, if someone says, yesterday, I went to the.
Your brain already predicts work like store, beach, office… and so on.
This speeds up comprehension massively
, and also reduces the load on memory.

(02:10):
and it explains why fluent speakers just feel what sounds right
… Prediction is one of the biggest differences between beginners and advanced
speakers… So, this means, when you are new to a given language, you
have no capacity to predict the next word, and therefore you have trouble to follow the

(02:35):
conversation… The next really important principle
is language doesn't happen in isolation.
Your brain pulls information from many regions.
Memory systems, like I have heard this phrase before emotion centers in

the amygdala (02:54):
Is this friendly, sarcastic, dangerous… Theory of
mind regions… What does this speaker mean?
What's their intention… And this is why humans can understand tone, jokes
, irony, and when someone is upset… or so really sad.

(03:18):
Even if the words are… saying something completely different.
and this again is something that adds to the load when learning a new language… Now when you
speak, your brain uses Broca's area located in the frontal lobe.
It handles building grammatical sentences, organizing word order, choosing the right form

(03:43):
, planning speech movements.
You could think of it as your sentence builder and speech planner… When you build a sentence
in your native language, you will have already
very good patterns and a lot of experience.
Coming up with a sentence that you already heard or used is easy.

(04:07):
A sentence you never heard or used before…is also not a huge problem because you can rely
on a huge network of data on the language and the possibilities… quite
similar to a large language model, actually.
But designing a sentence you never heard before in a foreign language with not that much

(04:31):
data, where you have to search for every word And all the grammatical rules… and so on.
This leads to overwhelm. That's one part of the difficulties with speaking in a foreign
language… The second lies in the following step.
Finally, after having a sentence ready in your brain, in your Broca's area…instructions go

(04:54):
to the motor cortex, which controls your tongue, lips, jaw, vocal cords, and
breathing… This turns the brain's plan into physical speech.
Normally, we have a ton of practice in producing the sounds of our mother tongue, But
when producing foreign sound patterns or even sounds you're not familiar with, it's challenging.

(05:20):
Your mouth is very lazy, to make it really simple, and it resists a bit to
produce foreign sounds and foreign words.
This only and really only gets better with practice.
For me, even though I understand English very, very well
, and I'm also able to write it quite well.

(05:43):
I still struggle with pronunciation.
And, to record this podcast, sometimes I have to
redo a sentence two or three times before I get it right.
I know what I want to say, but my mouth is still I'm still training my mouth to do…
so it can do what I want.

(06:05):
And yes, this party I didn't…edit…just for your…understanding…
… also for me in English, the th sound is
something I stumble… upon quite often.
To summarize it up, learning a new language feels hard because the whole system

(06:27):
is optimized for patterns you learned early in life, and a new language
requires…rewriting sound categories, building new prediction models,
connecting new words to meaning, learning new
mouth movements, storing new grammar patterns.

(06:48):
And this takes time…and repetition in context, not rote
memorization… Language processing is a team effort involving hearing,
recognizing prediction, interpretation, responding
, and controlling tiny, tiny, tiny muscles.

(07:09):
And your brain does all of this in milliseconds… Okay.
Right now, I hope I don't scare you off…and you don't feel too overwhelmed
… I hope you still stay here with me
and you feel you still feel like you want to learn German.
And… please, trust me, it won't take ages.

(07:31):
if you do it with the right input and method, You can build the foundation for your language
processing in a very short time, and that's basically the BEEE way of language learning.
And because this episode is already long, I decided to answer the next question, what happens
in the brain when you learn isolated word pairs with rote memorization in the next episode.

(07:57):
And we go further…into what BEEE is all about.
Hopefully, I see you there and be curious…