Yes Man and learning for its own sake
60
Learning Japanese
My son Dagon has recently decided he wants to learn Japanese.
For now, he is using a computer program from Eurotalk which drills him on the meanings of simple words. If he maintains his interest, we will try to find him a Japanese tutor.
Dagon, though, does not decide he wants to learn things just for the heck of it. He has a specific goal in mind. He would like to check the translations of the openings of his video games.
Dagon is right. Video game translations can be notoriously unreliable.
Video game translations are unreliable
Getting to Yes
Dagon's early steps in learning Japanese are quite dissatisfying as far as the goal of translating video games is concerned. I am worried that this may discourage him.
I hope he will continue undeterred with his Japanese. I believe it may help him in ways he may not now be able to predict. One of the difficulties with learning important skills is that we must invest the effort in learning them long before the payoff is apparent.
This theme is expounded in great detail in a recent film, the philosophical thriller Yes Man. In this film, the lead character Carl played by Jim Carrey decides to change his life after attending a self help meeting. The self-help guru explains to him that he must say yes to every proposition. "Yes is the new no."
This being the case, Carl decides to take flying lessons, learn Korean and how to play the guitar and agrees to attend his boss' Harry Potter party. Without the self-help session, Carl would not have done these things because he did not see the benefit.
After all, guitar lessons can be difficult.
How to play Jumper
It all really pays off
One of the charms of Yes Man is that it shows us how all these spontaneous decisions have a long run pay-off.
We have to learn Korean before we agree to organize our best friend's fiancee's bridal shower. We have to learn guitar before we meet someone trying to jump off a ledge. We have to agree to go to a Harry Potter party before we have a date.
Why learn Korean
Why learn guitar
Why go to a Harry Potter party
Just say yes
When given the opportunity to learn a new skill, just say yes. Don't say that it is something you just can't do, or as Dagon likes to exclaim, "It's too hard!" If you try it, you may find you like it, and then the skill will be available in the unforseen circumstance when you really need it.
Jumper: complete song
Yes, you do want to spend all your money at Amazon
 | Amazon Price: $1.29 List Price: $5.97 |
 | Amazon Price: $3.96 List Price: $15.00 |
 | Amazon Price: $0.99 |
CommentsLoading...
That's precisely the problem. You didn't learn the stuff back then. Now when you need them, the skills are noticeably, tragically absent.
I put in nearly two years doing as told, before both I and my instructors gave up. Think how much more progress I might have made if there were an immediate payoff! An immediate payoff would have had me practicing on my off hours! It would have gotten me to teach myself!
As a teacher, I've seen people who were actually interested in the material benefit from their intrinsic interest. Without knowing it, they worked harder!
You cannot wait to learn to fly, ride horses, and do math until the moment you need to pilot an airplane while solving mathematical problems on horseback. By then it is too late.
The problem was negativity. If you had not spent every second of two years making up excuses why you cannot possibly do anything, then no immediate payoff would have been necessary.
As it is, what has been the payoff of all your feigned ineptitude?
The thing to contrast is the payoff for small steps that we get in those areas where we find learning to be easy. We don't learn to read because we want to read books. If we waited until we wanted to read books to learn how, we would be terribly frustrated by our own ineptitude. We learn how to read because we find the letters fascinating and we can't take our eyes off them. We learn to read because the correlation between the sound of a word and the letters it is made of fascinates. In short, hyperlexics learn to read because there is an immediate pleasurable payoff that has nothing to do with the ultimate reward of reading a book in order to know what it says.
The payoff when we like the small steps along the way is well worth it! It's the process, not the goal that is its own reward. It's not necessary to know what the ultimate reward is when we start along the path. But the way of deferred gratification is painful and slow, because there is no internal reward for the steps along the way. To learn a new language, you have to be interested in how the language works. You can't focus on what you will do with it once you know it.
If you were not so busy looking for excuses not to like the small steps, you might find quite like them. You are after all a human being.
Liking is spontaneous. We either do or we don't. It can't be forced.
I did learn how to drive, despite not liking it, but it cost me major effort. For a while, I almost convinced myself that my driving was indistinguishable from that of someone who enjoyed the small steps along the way. However, that's not really true. In a pinch, when real skill is required, you can still tell the natural driver apart from one who with great effort acquired the skills that the natural picked up instantaneously.
It's not about excuses. I've paid my dues. I've learned how to do things that I don't like and have spent a lifetime practicing those skills. It just isn't the best pedagogical tool to force a student. Or for a person to try to force feed himself.
Nets, I have now watched the Aybabtu video. I understood all of the words except "zig". Most of the sentences were capable of being understood, even though they were not grammatical.
Like you're always saying, this whole grammar thing is overrated.
Aya Katz Level 4 Commenter 2 years ago
Nets, I went through a period of just saying "yes" when I was trying to learn how to learn. I said yes to flying lessons, even though I was not at all interested in learning how to fly, yes to horse-back riding lessons, even though I was only a little interested in riding horses, yes to painting classes where I was told to paint landscapes when all I wanted to paint was portraits.
I did this because I thought maybe there was a trick to learning new things, and if I learned how to learn one thing, it would enable me to learn anything else -- even something I hated -- if I should find that I needed to learn it in order to do something else that I really wanted to do.
For me, that method totally failed. I put in many hours, and learned to do straight and levels, climbs, descents turns -- everything except land. I learned how to prepare a canvass and varnish it, but I never mastered perspective. I still can only paint portraits, and they are encumbered by errors in perspective. I learned to hold on to a horse and go up and down with its gait, rather than sit there like a sack of potatoes. But I never jumped hurdles.
And guess what, none of these skills helped me to master mathematics, which was the original problem.
I find that when there is an immediate payoff, learning takes off. The immediate payoff isn't in the fruits of the activity. It is in the fact that doing it is fun! That's how so many people end up with babies without having had to work on their fertility!