Listening to recited scripture without translation improves language acquisition

Evidence

For one thing he found that his Arabic improved dramatically. After a while he rarely consulted the English translation, and he could listen closely to the words and more or less follow along. Through it all he learned what was in the Qur’an (and what wasn’t). He heard its poetry and read its stories and experienced an awakening. To this day he describes the feeling the Qur’an gave him as one in which his heart filled with the Holy Book’s grace. Something spiritual was happening to him, and in the stillness of those nights, while the rest of the house slept, he could sense the faith rise in him as sure as the mercury climbs in a thermometer on a summer day. — Moustafa Bayoumi, How Does It Feel to Be a Problem? Being…, 841

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Deep Listening’s claim that deep, repeated listening to a source transforms comprehension — passive immersive listening as a language-learning mechanism. — connects to: Knowing in fragments and listening without mastery can be legitimate ways of learning — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as…, 347
• SEED: The ‘rose reading’ of scripture in a second language improving comprehension is a strong personal-knowledge-management angle: repeated exposure to primary sources builds fluency where translation access may build an angle for an article on how we learn religious or specialist texts.