Motivating the study of language

I've written about why I think I should keep learning Acadian French:

I think connecting with your heritage is an example of a good, well-motivated reason to study a language. And I do believe you need a good reason, because language acquisition is a lot of work. It takes literal years of patience and practice to get to a point where you can comfortably communicate with other people. Lucky for me, I've studies French for most of my life. More than anything, keeping Acadian French just means using it. Improving my confidence with it. The hard part is over.

The original title of this article was "Should I keep studying Toki Pona?" But before I attempt to answer that question, I want to talk about another language I've been trying to learn for a long time that I'm not able to "just use". Namely, Mandarin.

I've been trying to learn Mandarin since I was in middle or high school, so maybe near a decade now. Not continuously, of course. I think if a kid was continuously studying a language for ten years it'd be almost impossible for them not to become proficient in it. With enough exposure to something you kind of just figure it out. But the story of me trying to learn Mandarin is the story of me figuring out how language learning works outside of the classroom. There isn't really a large population of Chinese people in eastern Canada, and not much interest in teaching Mandarin as a foreign language, so I was on my own. First with those shitty language learning apps, then trying to memorize every character by repeatedly writing it out by hand, then using Anki to memorize radicals in isolation, then words with no input, then Rosetta Stone, then, finally, with a combination of spaced repetition and comprehensible input study.

Within each attempt was several months of burnout, several months of trying again. Between each attempt was even longer periods of burnout, wondering if this has always just been a pipe dream. But, I'd always come back to it eventually.

If someone asked me point blank why I was studying Mandarin¹ and I was feeling honest, I'd probably tell them it's out of spite. At some point in the distant past, someone probably told me that it was really hard for Westerners to learn Mandarin, maybe even impossible. Obviously it's not literally impossible, there's more than enough White boy shocks Chinese restaurant worker with perfect Beijing dialect slop on the internet to prove otherwise, but they aren't kidding when they say it's hard. At the time it was probably spite at those who said it was too hard, to prove myself. Today, more than anything, it's spite against myself, and the persistent nagging feeling that I can't do it.

I fear that's what it is, anyway. Not the least because I'm not confident spite is reason enough to finish what I've started. But if spite isn't reason enough to learn a language, there must be some other reason I've been trying for the better part of a decade.

I think not treating it as an abstract puzzle to be solved helped quite a bit. At some point in high school I got weirdly into Daoism. Ursula K. Le Guin's translation of the dao de jing is probably still one of my favourite books. I like watching C-dramas.² I find Chinese history really interesting. And it certainly helps that I actually have people in my life now who speak Mandarin as a first or second language. It's hard for it to be abstract when you encounter it as a living language in your own life. Is that reason enough?

Maybe you don't need specifically cogent argument to do something you want to do. Maybe you don't need a deep understanding of why you want to do something to do it. Maybe if you don't have a very good reason to do something, overthinking it will only make you feel insecure. Maybe the best reason to do something is that you simply enjoy doing it.

So… Toki Pona

Toki Pona is a constructed language notable for not having many words. Otherwise, people use it as they would any other language. It's kind of cool. There's some active communities of tokiponists on the internet, and it seems like it'd be fun to be a part of them.

The design of Toki Pona forces you to think about objects in a kind of unusual way. For example, there is no single word for "computer". If you want to express something about a computer, you need to break it down into the things that it is, that it represents, in a way that maps onto the limited vocabulary of the language. There is, for example, a word for "tool" (ilo) and "knowledge" (sona). That's where you get the oft used noun phrase "ilo sona" (knowledge tool). This is kind of interesting in its own right and maybe having to do this a lot would give you some perspective on linguistics and how we think about the world.

A few weeks ago, I tried picking up Toki Pona again, having languished for a few months, mainly as a way to get back into the habit of doing Anki revisions every morning. I rediscovered pretty quickly that while memorizing all the words is easy, actually understanding the language takes a lot more practice. While you might know that "ilo sona" generally implies a tool that has to do with knowledge, if you didn't already know that's what tokiponists often call the computer, realizing it means that rather than e.g. a textbook is by no means easy. Not to mention that different people choose to describe the same thing in different ways (for example, I might prefer to call computers "ilo nanpa" (number tool)). While learning the language superficially is pretty easy, learning it to a point where you can actively engage with the community is significantly harder.

Is that worth it?

The other day, I stumbled on the Bluesky account of lipamanka, who's one of the more notable people in the Toki Pona world. They've been trapped in an ongoing conflict with the original creator of the language over the last year. A number of community members, including lipamanka, came together to publish a statement about it:

This is a very diplomatic description of what happened. from lipamanka's account, it sounds like the Toki Pona community has been quite a miserable place to be for a while.

Is that worth it?

Anki's spaced repetition algorithm is designed to enable a somewhat predictable rate of memorization. In this spirit, it includes a tool to simulate future reviews to determine how much of a deck you'll have memorized a certain amount of time in the future. If I study every day, learning new words every day, and never burn out, it'll take me about a year and a half to memorize the rest of my cards, all the way through HSK 6. Notably, this is the old HSK system, which has been panned by the international language learning community for poorly representing how much of the language you need to know to be proficient. Progressing through all the levels of the new system would take significantly longer.

But I don't know. I guess I think it's worth it. Otherwise I wouldn't be trying. And with that, I should probably go do my Anki.

Footnotes

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