Motivation is a mug's game

I've labelled three previous posts with the label 'motivation'. I'm going to disagree with them here, or at least go off on a different tangent.

It was a post on The Mezzofanti Guild that got me thinking, eventually to to change my mind. Donovan Nagel writes a lot of sense, but I'm going to disagree with him (and with my previous self) on the issue of motivation.

If you feel the need for any form of motivation, whether intrinsic or extrinsic, then I think that you've already lost.

By subscribing to the notion that it is necessary to be motivated to spend time on a language, then what you are saying, essentially, is that language learning is inherently not enjoyable. That it is work that you need to endure for a future pay-off.

I mean, you don't think of needing to motivate yourself to eat out at a restaurant, watch your favorite sport, or watch movie. (Well, not usually.)

Therefore, if motivation raises its head as an issue whenever you consider spending time on language learning then you're doing something wrong, it seems to me. You are going about it the wrong way.

If this works so well, why hasn't it been done before?

I can anticipate what people will say about my language-learning technique

If this works so well, why hasn't it been done before?

I would only be able to point out that

Q&A why was this idea not come up with earlier (for language learning)? Cycle seats, people do without thinking. Fashion. Shaving. Brushing teeth. Immunizing their children.

Boy kicks a stone

Let's say that you are the grandson of Pele, the famous football player, and that you wish to follow in his footsteps and become a professional player. In fact, you feel some pressure on you to succeed.

And so you enroll at the best football school in town, even though it's on the other side of town. And you make sure never to piss a day. Everyday you walk there, or even run so as to get there on time, whatever the weather.

You work your butt off at that school. You study the theory, you do the drills, you complete your homework, and you ace all of your exams.

But all that book study doesn't help you to become a champion. You become a pretty good club player, but that is all. Did you just not have the talent? Couldn't you have tried just a little harder?

Sadly, the fault is not yours. The fault is in the schooling system. You see, you weren't studying football there. You were learning about football, and that's not the same thing as learning football itself.

In fact, the only reason you became a reasonably competent player was that you'd kick a stone along as you hurried to reach school before the bell.

There's nothing that you need to DO

You want another language. Okay. But then immediately you think to yourself, "In that case, what do I need to do?"

Right away, you are heading off-track.

Obviously you need to do something. I don't deny that. But it's more along the lines of allowing something to be done to you. It's arranging the condition and setting up systems and habits, after which you allow the process to happen to you.

You're not to put words into your head. You are not the one who must learn rules and apply them. You are not the one who must push through the nervousness barrier and force yourself to speak. 

No, no no . . . None of that!

You're not the doer, you're the do-ee.

You're not responsible for the results, either. And that's good to realize, because this removes any pressure of possible failure. 

You're not to measure your achievements either. You aren't achieving in the sense that you've been trained to expect. It won't go neatly and tidily. 

You'll get better imperfectly, messily, sloppily, randomly, magically, and unfathomably. You'll learn the language without knowing how you did it! 

Don't put pressure on yourself to remember vocabulary, to spell correctly, to pronounce correctly, to understand the rule, to comprehend, to treat language learning as a serious business, or to study in any way.

Put yourself in the right environment, and get your brain into the right state. That's all that's required of you. The rest will happen automatically.

Don't consciously try to learn a language. You can't. No one can. The most that you'll achieve is to learn a few things about it.

Set some rewards

1.     Establish some rewards or a reward system humans need to succeed with simple intermediate steps

Use your technical knowledge

Use your technical knowledge (“[it] is often the key that unlocks the gate of language learning” Kato Lomb)

Understand habits

1.     Understand habits Why is it hard to start a habit? Why is it hard to stop one? How can both of these be true? It’s because both of them represent change, and the organism resists change.

Read compulsively

compulsive, compeling

Put input before output

Push the pace

so as not to analyze

Proof yourself against failure

There's only one way to fail

Proceed with an attitude of utter conviction

In her book Dr. Kato Lomb lists her 10 commandments for language learning. The tenth is to be firmly convinced that you are a linguistic genius.

Attitude is that important.

As Henry Ford said:

Whether you think you can, or you think you can't, you're right.

But I think that there's more. It's possible to inflate your confidence to some extent, but not as much as if your conviction was based upon a solid foundation.

(The metaphor of a house built on sand or on rock fits right here.) 

What are those expressions called - when you repeat positive thoughts to yourself? Oh yes, self-affirmations. It seems to me that that practice wouldn't work so well in a vacuum. 

Prioritize listening

Unless you are deaf, you would have learned your own language by listening. Everyone did! Even books, when they were introduced to you, were read out aloud. We’re all hard-wired, in stereo, to our ears. Listening is important.

So why is it at school, when we’re asked to learn another language, that listening is so de-emphasized? Why is it that we, and our teachers, are so uncomfortable using that medium? I mean, it’s true, isn’t it? I’m right, aren’t I? Or have things changed from when I remember?

I suppose it's that writing feels safer. You can stare at it. You can refer back to it. You can keep it pinned to the page. You can see how it is formed. All those things are hard to do with the spoken word. No sooner does it appear . . . than it’s gone. You can’t show off to the teacher how much you’ve done.

Yes, it takes some doing to get used to listening. It took me quite a time to manage it, even after I had decided on its value, and that I ought to. I taught a one-year English course fairly recently during which I urged people to start listening, but for the duration of that course I couldn’t bring myself to follow my own advice.

The history of my folly

Preserve your mistakes for posterity. 

Perhaps you don’t regard making a mistake as actually bad. Perhaps you are quite resigned to the need to make mistakes in order to learn, and you need no convincing as to their value. 

But there might remain a sense of embarrassment.

It feels embarrassing to blunder. You feel a fool when you put your foot in your mouth. You feel like a dick when you trip, a klutz when you stutter (I could go on . . . )

And that’s not good, because any such inhibitions have the effect of slowing you down and making you do less. So here’s a strategy that you could use.

Write down your best bloopers. Start a collection of your goofs. Turn them into anecdotes that you tell at your own expense. Trot them out at parties, and be the loudest to laugh. 

In her book, Dr Kato Lomb refers often to “the history of my folly”. She is not too shy to recount a number of personally embarrassing incidents.  

That’s one way to reduce their potency, and take away the sting. That’s how you neutralize their poison, and remove their fangs. 

The only ‘disadvantage’ with this technique is that you are much less likely to repeat those entertaining mistakes.

Prepare for a fall

Prepare for falling off the wagon

Falling off the wagon is not an issue. It’s not important. It’s certainly not a tragedy. However, failing to climb back on the wagon would be.

And so if—or when—you fall off (as most of us do), that’s the time to be helpful. Make it easy to get back on. Don’t berate yourself and feel bad. That wouldn’t serve you.

Instead, clamber back up. Take a breather. Take it easy for a while. And then, gradually, figure out where you went awry. In other words, try to pinpoint what brought about your lapse. Use your ‘failure’ as a learning experience instead. Finally, make an adjustment or two to reduce the likelihood of it happening again.

Me, I’ve fallen off and gotten back up (sometimes after a lengthy gap) more times that I can recall!

Practice patience

Be patient with yourself.

Why?

Because language absorption takes a fair amount of time. There's no getting around that fact.

If you try to rush it, or force it, then you'll put yourself under pressure. That works to your disadvantage, because stress slows down the learning process.

Be in the mindset of enjoying the journey. Savor it. What's the hurry?

Play is the way

Look it up in a book, please to confirm what I'll say here.

Children play. Why? Because that's how they grow and learn. Naturally, no schooling needed. It's the best way, the most effective way, and the way that's most fun.

Many adults stop playing. They stop growing and learning. That's their own doing and their own choice.

You do what you choose to do, and become who you train yourself to be.

Playing allows you to experiment, try on different roles, make mistakes, try things again, in new slightly different ways, from different angles and to get used to the moves all in a safe environment (because, whether you win or lose it's just a game).

You need to be in that energized-but-relaxed state in order to perform well. It's a fine balance, and sometimes you get carried away by passion and excitement, in which case there may be tears . . . or hooliganism.

So be playful as you engage with language.

SMART goals in Language Learning?

SMART goals are all the rage these days. Nevertheless, I'd be wary when it comes to applying them to language learning.

My main reservation with SMART goals is that they carry an unpleasant taint. The put me in the mindset of having tricked myself into doing something disagreeable. They remove the magic of forming a relationship with a language.  They place language into a context of work. In short, they place languages in an environment  similar to school.

Yes, you could do it. You could set yourself rules of numbers of hours, lines of text, numbers of words, levels, grades, exams to pass to progress to the next stage.

But I think that I'd rather use enjoyment as my yardstick. If I can enjoy what I do with the languages that I have an interest in then that's good enough for me. The progress will come all by itself.

Finally, there's the danger that your SMART goal is too a SAFE a goal. 

As Michelangelo said:

The greater danger for most of us lies not in setting our aim too high and falling short, but in setting our aim too low, and achieving our mark.