Unstuck: For the Love of Languages

Waterfall in the Hachimantai Mountains, Iwate, Japan. October 2020.

I want to share a thought that wouldn’t leave me last night. It needs more research and testing, but it is the start of an idea. It may be a valuable key to getting unstuck in the process of learning a foreign language. Learning a language effectively has many factors that go into it, but I think one of the most important ones is to embrace the right mindset so you can see clearly what is helpful to your language-learning journey rather than get paralyzed and give up on it before you even enjoy it. Time to get unstuck.

The mindset I want to share is making the distinction between love and ability. There is a difference between doing what you love and doing what you are good at. It may seem obvious to some people, but I've confused the two at times. There can also be overlap, which I'll discuss more below, but these two ways of doing things serve different purposes as well as have different motivations.

Doing what you love should be for the sake of doing that thing alone, not for marketing, money, prestige, or some other future plan. I'm not saying those cannot be results from doing something you love, but those cannot be your purpose or motivation in doing it. You do what you love because you love it. It simply gives you joy to ski, to talk with strangers, to watch movies, or to write. Whatever it is you love to do in this life, its purpose is doing it for its own sake. The motivation is love for the thing itself.

Doing what you are good at can have some overlap with what you love, but it is entirely different in its purpose. You can use what you are good at for work and long-term goals. You can use what you are good at to help other people as well. The best combination is finding what you are good at to match what needs are in your community. Doing what you are good at does not need to be something you necessarily love, but it helps to have a good degree of interest in it to keep you engaged in it long-term. The overlap comes where you may become very skilled at something you love. That is when you can choose if you want to try doing more with it than loving it. Just don’t lose sight of your motivation behind doing it.

Now let's tie this mindset to learning a foreign language. I have spent over eight years now on Japanese. I had a few experiences in recent months where I finally felt like I had reached some point of understanding Japanese, where I could read a book and think “I've got this!” Where someone said something to me and I didn't have to ask for them to repeat it. However, a majority of the time when dealing with the Japanese language, my mind is like “Woah, wait, what?” When I write messages to friends back in Japan, I still pull up a translator app to check if my more complicated sentences are what I meant to say in Japanese through reverse translating it (meaning I write it in Japanese then translate it into English to see what I get. It sometimes works.). I'm far from being “good at it” with Japanese, and that is okay because I love it. I will keep listening to music and reading Japanese. If I make it something I study for the love of studying, not for some idea that I can profit from it, the pressure is off from being good at it. I can just enjoy it as I have these past eight years.

An example of enjoying my language skills by taking the pressure off being good at it came from using Japanese at work for four years. I was being paid to teach English and entertain kids all day, not paid to use Japanese. I did use it in writing lessons plans for Japanese teachers and for other work and travel communication. However, I was lucky from the start to fall into the mindset of just using Japanese for the sake of communicating and not caring if it was accurate. It worked. I really enjoyed talking with people in Japan, and I'm sure they were happy enough that I tried bridging the communication gap with my random code-switching between Japanese and English.

Doing what you love can turn into something you are good at, but turning what you love into something profitable is detrimental to the love of the thing. I may try my hand at translating Japanese, but my purpose is not to make it a profitable career, but to do it because I want to understand Japanese better. It is because I love it. If it does lead me to make some money, that is a result, not the motivation behind studying it.

So if you are feeling stuck, as I have at times, throw out those articles that tell you what are the most “useful” foreign languages to learn. Throw out the notion that studying a foreign language makes you a better employee. Do it for love. Take some time to study a language for the sake of studying the language. That is my unasked-for advice for today.

Free your mind to do what you love for the love of it without attachment to the results.

I know what I love. Now please excuse me while I figure out what I’m actually “good at.”