Wouldn't you know it? Hand gestures dramatically improve language learning!
Now this is something that I taught myself from music when I was trying to learn tones in Vietnamese many, many years ago. I would take my hands and direct the way that the tones should rise, fall, punctuate, break and what not. I would over exaggerate the pronunciation, slowly at first, then progressively faster. But each time I would use my right hand to "direct" my voice as a conductor would direct an orchestra or a brass and woodwinds band. This helped in my learning tones in Vietnamese quite well. In fact, I would say remarkably well. I sometimes try to use a similar approach when learning non-tonal languages as well but the problem with that is I don't seem as naturally inclined to do it. (Maybe I should consider ways to reverse this?)
Now I came across an old article in the Science Daily where I see that a Psychology researcher, then at the University of Rochester but now is at the University of Iowa, Dr. Susan Wagner Cook, found that students who gesture when doing algebraic problems retained far more of their lessons three weeks later than students who did not gesture.
Why does this not surprise me at all?
I believe that these findings of Dr. Cook are definitely related to why the language shadowing technique, which Alexander Arguelles so believes in, and the sign language used in the fluency game of the Language Hunters seems to work so well. With anecdotal evidence one can see that using gestures and body movement while studying can help you not only to retain languages, but from my own experience to more rapidly learn languages as well. And even though from what I am reading about this study, while it focuses on teachers in classrooms, I think it works just as well, if maybe not even better with the autodidactic learners (like myself).
Actually, I don't know how I missed this research as I try to keep up on things like this. The story was even covered in the Washington Post. And the next year a similar study, entitled Gesture Gives a Hand to Language and Learning: Perspectives from Cognitive Neuroscience, Developmental Psychology and Education, which was focused specifically on foreign language acquisition was also published by three psychologists.
Oh, and if you would like to read specifically about Wagner Cook's research you can find it at the National Institute of Health's public access section of the NIH website.
I find this all fascinating and you'd better bet that I plan to experiment with this personally a bit more often now. And I will report on what I find out.