Why are there so many questions about motivation?

[Cainntear]

I suspect it's in part because of the common trope that "language is hard, you've just got to want it" and the perennial problem of students who are doing well being taken by teachers (and now gurus) as proof that their classes (or bits of advice) are good and right, whereas students who are struggling just can't possibly want it enough and just aren't putting in enough hard work.

If society has convinced people that they're not the problem cos they don't want it enough, it makes sense that they would go looking for how to get motivated rather than describe the reasons they're struggling with the learning materials and look for advice on something else to use instead.

[Le Baron]

As I understand it there are a few other people on here who lift weights who will be familiar with the following. I've been doing it since I was about 15 and anyone who does it knows there are slumps in motivation, often caused by actual physical fatigue build-up. In this scenario it is dealt with by load reduction (now called 'deloading') which reduces fatigue and generally causes you to rebound with a feeling of motivation. This should be normal practise for any long-term pursuit if it is to maintained. Few can keep up 100% motivation for very long periods and those who do will eventually burn out.

However I think Leosmith is talking about initial sparks of motivation and I agree that if you don't have it, you just don't have it and you can better spend your precious time elsewhere doing something else.

I agree with Cainntear that struggling and difficulty could be confused with 'motivation', but those things can be solved.

[alcarazesco]

I always just say that habit trumps motivation.

This should be enshrined somewhere. It's not motivation these people need, but commitment. A sort of 'daily minimum' in your language journey really helps with this. Even very short study sessions or 'dead time' radio listening help if done long enough.

I used to swim competitively. Our coaches were very demanding. The practices lasted two hours or more, the exercises designed to push our hearts to their absolute limits. Of course it was painful. Now, many years have passed since my last race, yet I still swim and exercise regularly. Not a day goes by that I don't run, lift, or swim. When you do activities long enough like that, it becomes part of your life; you just can't get rid of it. Kind of like brushing your teeth. It's the same deal with languages: On my way to work or back home, I tune in to Radio France. At lunch I read an article or two on Ici Radio Canada. In the evening, I review my notebook of words and grammar concepts and write out some example sentences. I don't think I spend more than an hour a day doing these activities, but they're more than enough to help me progress. Of course, I go heavier on some days than others (like weekends and holidays when I have time to study deeply and review), but that aside, I always set aside some time every day to do the little things. At no point do I think about my own motivation. I just go about it daily because it pleases me, and because it's been part of my life for long enough now.

[tiia]

I don't think that language learning is in any way too special that it needs more motivation than some other activities. It may take longer to give you actual results,but let's take a look a sports and all the people signing up at a fitness studio at the beginning of the year. Heard often enough that in January the studios are fuller than at any other time of the year. Many people try to start, but never get into the habit of actually going regularly. Sports are also an activity that is regarded as "one should do this".

The whole habit building process is quite important. For me this is why taking courses works so well: Once I signed up for something, I don't have to motivate myself anymore to get started, a problem that I would otherwise have. I don't think it's a shame to admit, that I need an external schedule to keep me going. For me it's leading to better results than if I were trying to do it without the fixed appointment. (But I still do something in between classes, but it can happen any time until the next class.)
Since I decide myself what schedule/course is acceptable for me, it usually also means that the weekly schedule will be more or less balanced out according to my needs.

Anyway I'm not a huge fan of all the "a few bits every day" stuff one gets to hear all the time nowadays. You don't have to learn every day in order to learn a language. Regularly yes, and I would also recommend to go for at least twice a week, but every day is simply not necessary. It can put some people under too much pressure or make them feel bad, if they don't manage to do so. If it happens to be that one learns a bit every day, it's fine, but as soon as it feels like a burden, it's too much. Especially if learning the language is not mandatory to achieve something else.

Another thought: I'm a juggler and a unicyclist, and funny thing: I've never once seen anyone complain about lacking motivation in my juggling and unicycling groups. It's probably not a coincidence that there's no prestige to be gained by learning these skills.

This is now a bit offtopic: I guess those people just don't show up anymore. That's at least what I did and what I also noticed from a few others. I decided to let it more or less go, before I develop any negative feelings towards it. Every now and then I can still grab some toys and play around with them at home, but it's no active hobby anymore. (I actively juggled for about five years btw.)

[Cavesa]

It actually makes perfect sense.

1.overall, there is a huge problem with motivation for anything everywhere since Covid. The pandemia was not the only cause, but it clearly accellerated tons of stuff already quietly rotting in our society. The huge problem with depression, finding meaning of life, struggling more and more to survive, some toxic traits of today's job market, all that really got to a different level in a lockdown and the few years of generalized madness. People are struggling with motivation for absolutely anything. And it shows.

2.Languages are different from juggling, they are not just a hobby. And treating these questions like "if you need to ask, you are not motivated enough to succeed" is simply a privilege showing off. Never forget that most of us don't learn languages as just a hobby. We are often forced to learn or be punished by the society. Or we are motivated sometimes purely by money, and there is nothing bad about it. We are decididing to put some already scarce resources (including energy, and motivation, but more obviously time and money) into a long term project. And even in case of a hobby, people are looking to get more out of it now, more satisfaction, more happiness, more self-worth, more fun in their lives.

3.Even more relativisation of language learning value, with the huge growth of IA, with globalisation of culture, and with rise of various social and political issues using language bareers for their advantage.

So, it makes absolute sense to discuss motivation. Sure, motivation by itself is not enough to succeed, but it makes things much much easier subjectively (which is all that counts in the end).

In a world struggling with a huge motivation problem, flooded with tons of clearly toxic motivations ("I wanna make lots of money as a youtuber!"), and with millions of people in dire need of improving their lives in ways languages can help (a better paying job, moving abroad, thriving in a diverse society, etc), discussing motivation is essential. Motivation to learn languages is a bigger issue than it ever was.

Yeah, you definitely shouldn't spend too much time on it, or you won't have any left for learning itself.

But thinking about motivation and discussing it, and acting on it, that might actually be one of the biggest values the language learning community is bringing to today's world.

[kleene*star]

It should be important to understand why someone lacks motivation. Sure, there are people who simply don't have enough interest in foreign languages, but I'm pretty sure that a lot of people lack motivation because they don't know how to approach this hobby. Finding a studying method that works for you can be a daunting task that requires time and patience. So I think it can be extremely counterproductive to tell someone "it's just not your thing, get another hobby".

Having said that, I also agree with those who say that you shouldn't rely on motivation alone anyway. Motivation is something that waxes and wanes for (almost) everyone.

[bombobuffoon]

I did weightlifting for a number of years.

Weightlifting is very similar to language learning when it comes to programming and results. You get enormous results within the first 3-6 months. You will go from deadlifting 60kg to 160kg in 6 months. Then after its just a grind for imperceptible changes 0.5-1kg, in fact many or most days you can feel or even objectively are going backwards maybe you lose 5kg off your best lift. After a few years you kind of hit like 180-200kg and the results get even smaller after that. You have to have a program that takes into account that linear progression is impossible after 6 months.

I found that similar to language learning, except LL is even more disappointing. 4th year learning and yet when I turn on the TV and understand almost nothing. That's demotivating. I am getting mentally prepared for the upcoming disappointment of completing 500 hours of study. No doubt further disappointment lies in wait at 1000 hours, 2000, 3000, 4000....

[Cainntear]

OK, so all the weightlifters here have inspired a new way of describing something.

With language, lots of teachers say "you can learn with anything -- it's only the amount of contact that matters." This is justified because people manage to succeed despite being taught in massively varying ways.

So let's apply that to weightlifting: "don't worry about technique -- if you just lift weights, you'll get better." Obviously anyone who does weight training will know that that's an invitation to injury, and that there are certain activities that are harder to do and so you have to force yourself to do them, because they're important.

We've probably all been in the situation of focusing too much on one (language learning) thing once we'll built up a rhythym, then spotted that we're doing it and started doing something else, but a lot of other people don't (as demonstrated by having a 4+ years streak on Duolingo, for instance), so the analogy seems valid. It absolutely isn't just about doing lots; it's about doing lots right.

Which brings me back to a long favourite sports analogy.

I bought Terry Laughlin's book Total Immersion years ago, when I was wanting to get into swimming -- although I can't claim to have ever gottengood, it certainly improved my technique out of sight.

One of the things Laughlin talked about in the early section of the book was about how there was a common standard swimming technique that was taught (particularly the "S-stroke" with the arms in front crawl) and people who struggled were always told to focus more on doing the stroke absolutely right, by the book. But then they invented underwater chase cameras, and it became clear that the fastest pros were not doing a full S-stroke (you can't argue with video) and since then there have been massive leaps in world records because successive generations of pro swimming abandoned it more completely. (I believe Ian Thorpe was the first notable "no S-stroke" swimmer, and he smashed a lot of records, although he's since been dethroned by people who aren't as abnormally tall as him.) As such, generations of swimmers were champions in spite of their coaching, not because of it. And champions went on to fall into the trap of coaching by telling people to do what they were told to do rather than telling them what they actually did, because they simply didn't know it!

Which leads back to a book called The Pianist's Talent, which recounts how piano coaching instructions in Parisian conservatoires at the turn of the 19th to 20th century were varied to the point of being contradictory -- they would tell students which sets of muscles to be tense: some would say the front of the forearm (finger flexors) others the back (finger extensors); some would say the left and right hands had to be opposite in terms of front and back tension, others would say they had to be the same. Every single conservatoire coach would point to their own success as a concert pianist and the successes of some of their students as proof their technique was right.
There was a pianist, Raymond Thiberge, who wanted to find the truth of this, so he studied with a heck of a lot of the masters.
Fortuitously, Raymond was blind, so to study them, he had to put his hands lightly on their forearms, which he used to examine where the tension actually was.
What he found was that there was really practically no tension at all in anyone's hands -- they were all extremely relaxed.

i.e. All the techniques were wrong, and everyone was learning in spite of the techniques, not because of them.

This has been very influential in my thoughts on language learning -- I've always been looking to try to identify what it is that learners do while apparently following a particular course, because I know that the real secret lies not in looking at the superficial tasks they are doing, but at what they are doing under the surface in order to complete those tasks.
Doing differently seems to be an appeal to the same sort of ignorance that was pushed by the Behaviorist school of psychology.

[Le Baron]

Which leads back to a book called The Pianist's Talent, which recounts how piano coaching instructions in Parisian conservatoires at the turn of the 19th to 20th century were varied to the point of being contradictory -- they would tell students which sets of muscles to be tense: some would say the front of the forearm (finger flexors) others the back (finger extensors); some would say the left and right hands had to be opposite in terms of front and back tension, others would say they had to be the same. Every single conservatoire coach would point to their own success as a concert pianist and the successes of some of their students as proof their technique was right.
There was a pianist, Raymond Thiberge, who wanted to find the truth of this, so he studied with a heck of a lot of the masters.
Fortuitously, Raymond was blind, so to study them, he had to put his hands lightly on their forearms, which he used to examine where the tension actually was.
What he found was that there was really practically no tension at all in anyone's hands -- they were all extremely relaxed.

I recognise this. Not that I was at the Paris Conservatoire in the 19th century, but that I had several piano tutors (two outside school and several in the school) and the details of 'technique' differed wildly. A mixture of passed down 'theory' (as in those alleged reasons for holding your hands in a certain way) and personal developments. So you had those people telling you to hold your hand more like a spider and another who was telling you to do that, but playing flat-handed like Thelonious Monk. Telling you how to hold your elbows and manipulate your wrists for either power or to play delicately.

Every speciality has the problem of people (and often not really specialists, but self-appointed experts devising an endless supply of hyper-detailed pseudo treatises concerned with minute analysis and then dubious sets of rules. Which usually turn out not to be universally applicable. This sort of thing is now rampant in the popular language learning world.

To drop another layer of analogy onto this... When I decided not to pursue music at university I didn't stop playing. In fact I probably played more, first by auditioning for the Northern Ballet Orchestra (playing in an orchestra pit during the summer months) and playing jazz some evenings and weekends around Manchester city centre. Prior to this I had been heavily applying general music theory to wanting to play jazz (including playing from scores), without really having just tried to play lots of jazz - of the bebop variety. Whereas several years of just playing and playing is how you actually get good at it. I would compare this with speaking in a language. The point where you just have to put down the book. In the end quite a lot of the small details learned just don't come into play as you fashion a way of putting things into practice. Theory-to-practise is really a very personal thing which is hard to teach and explain, except for encouragement and some guidance.

I suspect that a lot of motivation is squashed by learners building a bigger mountain which they then have to climb. Imagining that they have to go through every minute step of eg. academically studying a sound system, then following and studying diagrams of how your throat and tongue has to be placed, then deconstructing/reconstructing grammar...and on and on with this idea that you have to master a vast field of language structure just so you can watch TV and read some novels and maybe speak to people. It's pretty absurd.

[bombobuffoon]

To drop another layer of analogy onto this... When I decided not to pursue music at university I didn't stop playing. In fact I probably played more, first by auditioning for the Northern Ballet Orchestra (playing in an orchestra pit during the summer months) and playing jazz some evenings and weekends around Manchester city centre. Prior to this I had been heavily applying general music theory to wanting to play jazz (including playing from scores), without really having just tried to play lots of jazz - of the bebop variety. Whereas several years of just playing and playing is how you actually get good at it. I would compare this with speaking in a language. The point where you just have to put down the book. In the end quite a lot of the small details learned just don't come into play as you fashion a way of putting things into practice. Theory-to-practise is really a very personal thing which is hard to teach and explain, except for encouragement and some guidance.

I suspect that a lot of motivation is squashed by learners building a bigger mountain which they then have to climb. Imagining that they have to go through every minute step of eg. academically studying a sound system, then following and studying diagrams of how your throat and tongue has to be placed, then deconstructing/reconstructing grammar...and on and on with this idea that you have to master a vast field of language structure just so you can watch TV and read some novels and maybe speak to people. It's pretty absurd.

This holds true for me. In general try to get things too right or get too good before attempting them. I don't want to accept that I will sound like a 5 year old before I can sound like a 10 year old and a 10 year old before I sound like a teenager and so on. I just want to be good right out of the gate. So I work on a lot of practice material and don't engage for fear of mistakes, embarrassment.

Funnily enough the opposite was also true for me. Three years ago I took some bad advice and I started out talking to everything and everyone for the first couple months with minimal knowledge and that was maybe counter productive, so I decided to cool my heels and get my chops up before trying again.

There's some magical balance between the two I'm sure. But sometimes it doesn't matter if you are playing Fmaj7 or FmajAdd9, its ok you just gotta give it to em.