Previous research has demonstrated that the integration of gestures into foreign language pedagogy benefits vocabulary learning. Nevertheless, there is only limited evidence for this central hypothesis and many questions are left unanswered. For instance, it still needs to be explored whether sensorimotor-enrichment effects during foreign language learning generalize to languages with lower degrees of similarity to the first language. In the present study we therefore investigated the potential benefits from sensorimotor-enriched instructions on learning a foreign language with a rather low degree of similarly to the participants’ first language. More specifically, we recruited young adult native speakers of German (N=80) and taught them the Persian translations of sixteen German words. In the training phase, participants learned the Persian words and their German translations either through a traditional vocabulary learning method or through multimodal stimulus presentation. In the testing phase, participants completed a recall test and two translation tests. The results did not corroborate the findings from previous studies as we did not observe reliable differences between the two instruction groups. We discuss the potential reasons for this discrepancy. Future research is needed to clarify the role of language similarity for beneficial effects of a multi-modal learning setting.