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Language Learning and Pleasure

Welcome to the Five Week Linguist show. If you want to learn a language or you teach a language, you’ve come to the right place. Join Janina each week for tips, resources, and advice for making engaging language learning happen anytime, anywhere.

Welcome to the Five Week Linguist show. I wanted to talk today about play pleasure in learning a new language. These are so important. So early in my career, I realized how essential fun is. It was definitely seen as something counter-intuitive. Learning isn’t fun. And it isn’t always fun. And it can’t always be fun. It shouldn’t always be fun, but I saw my role in teaching languages at school as something really… That most people just really didn’t want to sign up and do. I mean, the statistics will back me up on that. I think they would be kind of depressing if I researched them. They’re certainly easy to find, but the number of people in the United States who actually speak another language based on what they did at school, I want to say, it’s something like 1%. That’s according to the Atlantic, an article I read. I’m sure there’s more statistics out there. I want to say that the vast majority of people study languages for very limited periods of time and for very limited purposes, generally speaking, in high school for some kind of graduation requirement. And oftentimes, the study beyond that is to fulfill a college or university entrance requirement, or when they get to university to do more languages there.

And I realized the fun early on was really essential. And to be very honest with you, it was essential for me to get through the day. Here I had all of this stuff to teach and I had to find a fun way to do it that wasn’t going to get kids mentally exhausted and that I was going to enjoy my day. Every single day, I’m proven that it’s right, that the gains, the fun, the engagement work. And I wanted to dig a little bit deeper into the research behind that.

Language Learning and Pleasure: Dopamine

A few years ago, I started really thinking about neuroscience and, specifically, about dopamine. So, of course, our brains… That’s released when we get pleasure, our pleasure receptors. All of you that are neuroscientists out there, please forgive me for what I get wrong here. I’m certainly not a scientist and you’ll know more than I do, but I think that was my takeaway as a layperson. We have a pleasurable activity and we get something out of it.

So, I started really thinking about that with Duolingo. So, about five years ago, I think Duolingo’s been around longer than five years, but about five years ago it really caught my attention. More and more and more, I would hear people talk about their experiences with using it. And I say Duolingo, and I think there’s many other great programs out there that do the same thing, but essentially it’s that gamification piece, right? It’s that really getting into something and really enjoying it. I think that Duolingo used to count fluency in terms of percentages, which that’s another story. I don’t think they do that anymore. It’s not accurate. It doesn’t show an accurate reflection of what people do. It’s really about the amount of time and the amount of exercises that you’ve done accurately. They’ve made a lot of evolutions, but bottom line is that it’s giving you a reward, right? You’re investing your time in something, and you’re getting a reward back. You’re seeing your quote unquote fluency or percentages or whatever it is they’re counting. These numbers are going up.

So,