Fun is a difficult word. The range of meanings it can take is wide and everyone has their own interpretation. One person says watching classic Japanese films is fun. The other says that writing calligraphy is fun. Who’s right?
Fun is in the eye of the beholder. Fun is never about the action, it’s about who is doing the action. Fun is always relative to a person. When we say that motorcycles are fun, we’re not saying that these two wheeled machines have somehow been imbued with some quantum fun property. We’re saying that for some people, the act of riding a motorcycle, talking about motorcycles and looking at motorcycles is fun.
To say that you like to ride motorcycles says little about motorcycles but a lot about you.
And so when I and others speak about having fun with Japanese, it’s not a statement about any method, technique, book, TV show, movie, article, bar, theater, city, town, restaurant or shop. It’s about you. It’s what you enjoy, what challenges you, what excites you, what piques your curiosity, captures your interest, gives you ‘aha!’ moments, spurs you onward, motivates you, makes you laugh and cry, tense with anger and relax in comfort.
It’s what pulls you in.
Khatzumoto’s ongoing updates (part1, part2, and part3 as of now) on his Japanese learning experience produced a mini-goldmine of perspectives on the word ‘fun’. I yanked a few out of context for discussion fodder:
The catch is though, if watching Japanese TV shows or dubbed movies is the funnest[sic] thing for me and I focus on that, how will I ever learn to read or write fluently?
That one activity appears to be the most fun right now doesn’t mean it will always be that way. Watch too much TV and you’ll probably bore of it. What you may enjoy is not fixed for all eternity. Much of what you enjoy now, you may not have known existed 10 years ago.
As to reading, what topics do you enjoy? Seek them out in Japanese. That TV seems more fun than reading right now doesn’t mean it isn’t worth looking for fun reading material. And no matter what, if you want your writing in any language to be worth anything, you’ll have to do a lot of reading. Find something that pulls you in.
What a load of bollocks that fun is the key. I don’t suppose people doing PhDs consider fun to be a major element in the learning process. I can’t see med students chucking their books and saying to themselves, “You know, I just don’t feel this pharmaceutical effects on physiognomy gig, I think I’ll go watch House MD.”
Here, ‘fun’ has transmorgrified into ‘unproductive activity’ or possibly ‘procrastination’. The person pursuing the PhD presumably wants the degree. However, I would bet that the student who volunteers at hospitals and clinics finds the material easier to learn as they are hungrier for it from their real world experience.
Just because it’s a PhD doesn’t mean you have to learn everything from the book. And I’ll bet most doctors would say that the real learning occurs during residency. Would you let a burned out book smart doc operate on you? Or would you take the experienced doc whose passion for helping people made med school an enjoyable challenge?
Why dontcha’ll just go back to watching your little anime’s 24/7 Tofugu-style and while you’re at it looking up stuff in the dictionary is boring too—burn your dictionaries and just learn through osmosis.
What basis is there to assume that because someone finds something boring, they should never, ever, ever do it? Something that is boring is something you are less inclined to do. There is a frequency of dictionary lookups that is boring for a lot of people. They still think dictionaries are valuable, they just use them in moderation to avoid sucking the fun out of reading. No burning needed.
I mean I’m asking this as a serious question, the level of *fun* you guys seem to be talking about isn’t even an option for me. 電車男 is really a pleasure for me to watch, but if I was “fun” focused I would watch it one time only (I *loath* to watch or read anything a second time.) and burn through $200 in less than a week.
I think it’s a sad statement to live in a free country (presumably), and believe that certain levels of ‘fun’ are not an ‘option’. As the saying goes, whether you think you can or you think you can’t, you’re always right.
I think it ultimately comes down to what the definition of “fun” is, and how one goes about finding it. But at some point though, to attain a high level of fluency, I think you have to put your head down and plow through certain things you initially may not consider to be fun.
The next quote aptly addresses the previous, I think:
To be clear: what I define as fun in this case is not “something that makes you laugh” or “something that feels like playing a game”. It’s “something that attracts your interest and stimulates your mind”. This can apply even to the most serious of subjects.
Whatever attracts you to Japanese can be used to make the difficult, enjoyable.
About the ‘fun is bollocks’ comment, I just meant that I could think of about ten other things more important than fun in the AJATT learning method, and indeed many other methods. Here are some; amount of input, repetition / SRS, more listening practice than regular language learning methods, input before output, immersion, intensity/ drive/ motivation. comprehensible input / i+1, variety, etc.
This was an absolute non-sequitur for me. What definition of fun precludes anything in that list? Are fun and intensity mutually exclusive? Does input before output forbid fun? I think this is a case where the method is the center of the universe - where fun is derived more from feeling superior to others than from learning Japanese per se.
I like reading the editorial sections of newspapers. I wouldn’t necessarily call it fun, but it’s definitely enjoyable. Much like doing SRS reps (in moderation).
Enjoyable, fun; potaytoe, potahtoe.
So the key thing to this rambling message is that I’ve done SRS “the wrong way” — heaven forbid J-E entries! (I learned Mandarin C-E without trouble, btw. Though I agree J-E is best if you can learn that way.) But I had fun doing it, and never troubled myself that I wasn’t doing it “right.” I’ve still got results that I’m happy with, and I know I am on track to get the additional results that I’m seeking.
Keep on truckin’.
The Best Learners Have All the Fun
You are most able to learn when you are interested. Period. Children absorb knowledge like sponges because they throw themselves at what interests them. Being children, it’s all they can do.
But as teenagers and adults we acquire a new skill: the ability to force ourselves to learn even when we aren’t interested. But just because we can, doesn’t mean we have to consign ourselves to this approach.
Fun is about finding what interests you and taking advantage of your tremendous capacity to learn when your mind is ready to receive. Fun is about finding new material, locales and activities to further your interest.
To quote William Butler Yeats:
Education is not the filling of a bucket, but the lighting of a fire.
What fuels your fire? That is what fun is.