CB: Do you find you sort of have an attitude where you say “stick with it, it’s good for you”?

MCV: It’s all you can do.

CB: You’ll pass through that wall of understanding, honest! It’s like learning a language. We’ve done it. We’ve played games for years. We know the shorthand.

[…]

MCV: I’m guessing by the fact that you chose to dedicate so much of Gameswipe to help people understand that means that this lack of understanding and these barriers is something that frustrates you?

CB: Yes. I don’t know the way round it, exactly. It’s a quandary and one for games developers as a whole. The closest analogy really is that it’s like we’ve learnt a language. Gamers are people who’ve learnt Esperanto. There are these brilliant films being released in Esperanto and to try and introduce a non-Esperanto speaker to them is frustrating because they’re going to give up. They don’t understand it. It doesn’t mean they’re stupid and it doesn’t mean they’re bad at games. They just haven’t put in the ground work.

I was hoping you would touch on some of the types of work available to bilinguals. That’s of course assuming that you have experience with these kinds of jobs.

Also, it would be great if you went into detail about all of the types of benefits that one could gain AFTER one has become natively bilingual. I would say that your style of writing would make such an article very interesting to read.

On what you have written here already, I think you are trying to say that “there are great financial benefits waiting once you get there, but you have to motivate yourself through all of the tough work by making it fun / convincing yourself that it is fun.” Correct me if I’m wrong.

Dan

www.youtube.com/watch?v=2lXh2n0aPyw

So all in all learn a language because it’s fun. Who knows you’ll have so much fun that you’ll eventually forget about becoming fluent and just enjoy the path. Or at least that’s my story. I’ve forgot about doing Japanese hardcore a year ago when I first stumbled a cross this site. English was my passion, my life, and my desire. Now I started my Japanese project meaning that any desired English I would block from my head.

So make more posts Khatz and keep spreading that knowlege through people’s head.

Symptoms of people who learned a language for the money, and why I hate talking to them:
(1) Zero interest in the culture. They expect to address me in MY language and for ME to adapt to the offensive things that end up coming out of their mouths due to their lack of knowledge
(2) Disgusting accents — with the response to any critique “if you can understand me, it’s enough”, nevermind the strain and mind-numbing request for repeats required for me to get that “understanding”, these wankers give all the burden of the work in understanding to the listener
(3) (Some people…) Speaking so fast that they trip constantly over their own words and such that I have to strain really hard to understand — they are trying to show-off to their peers and “gain face”

Because with each language, I learn something new about humanity and about myself. I learned to be polite and clever in French, and how to be frank but not rude in German, and how to be empathetic and pleasant in Mandarin. The values of these cultures rubbed off onto me, and I absorbed the best of them. It’s a beautiful thing, and a lot of this cultural understanding can only come through how the language conceptualizes the world. So being a polyglot is a philosophical journey as well as a selfish one.

But I really really want to thank Khaz for demistifying language learning, so that being bilingual isn’t seen as an elite activity. We’re just people who spend our resources differently. And like Khaz says, at the end of the day it’s the person with real world skills who’s going to succeed, not the language monkeys who don’t anything except small talk. You need something to talk *about* in the language, too.

Just–right on, Khaz!

In the U.S. on the other hand there’s some craze going on to learn Spanish. Sure, there are quite some latin people in the U.S., but is that your main reason to learn Spanish? To fill your wallet? Same goes for Mainland Chinese learning Japanese or Cantonese people learning Mandarin; just to secure a bright future.

But most fail because their motivation is based on something they don’t fully support. We all want to have a bright future, but learning a language to achieve that is a bad beginning. Like Khatz says; you need to input such a ridiculous amount of time that if you’re not really motived you’re just aiming to fail.

Language learning should be a selfish thing, yes, but not to get rich. You only have to learn it because you really want to do it yourself. Other than that there’re no real reason.

I started Japanese for business reasons. I hold on for mangas-video games-Murakami books-Kitano films reasons.

To me this series feels misplaced and lacks your usual polish. After all you’re more guilty of 500 languages at once than most people here.(I(In reference to previous language studies prior to AJATT.)

This is, I feel, the key point of the article, and one that it’s taken me years (decades?) to learn. You could print this in 2-inch-high letters and it would still be too small.

For years, I’ve had jobs for which shipping the final product — the last 2% — was the satisfying part. (For some reason I thought that was the right idea.) Then I discovered something completely different for which the hard work that takes the first 98% of the time is the really satisfying part.

You might suspect the difference is only one of degree, but it’s such a huge difference that it leaks over from a quantitative difference into a qualitative difference. If I’m practicing *all the time*, I get better much faster, which makes it even more fun, which means I want to practice more, which …

You have to love the “putting hard work in” part of what you’re doing, not just the “getting results out”. Nobody loves anything enough to put in work they hate doing for a long time, just to get some results out years in the future. You will never stay motivated that long. You can bet Michael Jordan practices 27 hours a day because he loves shooting hoops, not because he wanted to wear a championship ring. That’s why I think AJATT might actually work: the Prime Directive seems to be something like “do whatever it takes to keep it fun”.

(And no, my activity B isn’t “speaking Japanese”, but it’s related, so that helps.)

But whatever it is, the next time I see some industry leader or head of the CBI caterwauling that our school leavers do not have adequate language skills I sill be screaming at the TV that they probably would if they saw that language ability actually paid in any quantifiable terms.

Yes, learn languages because you love them, because you love the process, or because you are some kind of masochist! But for goodness sake never forget the hard work you’ve invested in them when someone offers you a job that relies upon them for minimum wage + £1 an hour.

/rant over.