Alien Tongues: Why do we learn a language? The basics of understanding & harnessing your motivation to learn Japanese.
This insight was originally published on November 03, 2020, and transferred here later.
It all started with a "shower thought"...
I had been catching a bunch of old Stargate SG-1 episodes, and noticed that all the humanoid alien races spoke perfect, unobstructed English. It was as if English was the obvious default language of the universe, and it was just natural to speak it with no learning necessary. A lot of sci-fi media does this with the main language of their audience, and we normally suspend our disbelief because it is fiction. But why stop at fiction? How would it play out in real life?
If space aliens had contact with us Earthlings, what would make English so appealing over, say, Vietnamese? What makes a language worth learning over another language? And why should I, a person who has been learning about Japanese language and culture for a hot minute, have ever bothered to learn Japanese over some other language? The same question goes for anyone learning or wanting to learn a second language: “Why that language?”. Understanding the why, I find, is helpful to maintain focus during your language learning journey. If you get distracted or frustrated, you can always look back to your why(s) as inspiration to keep doing what you have been working so hard to do!
The psychology of motivation
I don’t know what drives space aliens to do what they do, but I know a little bit about how humans like to think sometimes. Maybe they think similarly! When it comes to motivation for us human creatures, Psychology People™ have split the idea into two rough types: extrinsic & intrinsic motivation.
Extrinsic
Extrinsic motivation is when we are motivated by an outcome or reward. Think of it like when you play a video game to get all those sweet achievements; or maybe you want to unlock that really cool character skin you saw. You might enjoy playing your game for other reasons too, but in this case, you have your eye on a prize. You choose to do specific things with that goal in mind.
When it comes to aliens, they might be on a diplomatic mission; or maybe a quest for trade & resources. With extrinsic motivators like that, they would do better to have a wider reach of communication. Picking one of the most spoken languages on Earth would be the more utilitarian route here. Mandarin, English, and Spanish might be very enticing languages for those aliens! If they wanted access to a very specific resource, they might want to speak just as specific of a language. Choosing Kazakh would do, for example, to speak with one of our planet’s lead producers of Uranium…
But what about you, me, & the rest of people who want to learn the Japanese language? What are our extrinsic motivators? For my learning Japanese, one extrinsically motivated reason was that I greatly desired to learn more about "eastern" cultures. I felt like half of the world was omitted in every history class I had ever taken, and I wanted to learn more about the world & cultures I didn’t have the same sort of understanding of or access to. Another extrinsic motivator, one that you might share with me, is that I wanted to be able to understand & translate my own subtitles to anime like the proper weeaboo I’ve begrudgingly grown to be.
Intrinsic
But maybe you can’t think of any extrinsic motivators right now, and that is okay! You don’t have to have any immediately. Let’s see if you can think of some intrinsic motivators instead!
Intrinsic motivation is a little trickier to describe because it is more abstract. This motivation isn’t about getting to the happy ending to the story, but instead about the joy of the journey. It is often described as the enjoyment of doing a thing because you just like doing it. It is fun for its own sake! Because of that, it is also one of the stronger forms of motivation to do a thing, since you don’t have to “earn” or be bribed by anything.
If we go back to outer space, an alien might pick an Earth language because it found the language quite beautiful or fascinating. Maybe an intrinsically motivated alien would pick one of our planet’s many sign languages because it enjoyed making those physical motions; or maybe it couldn’t hear to begin with, and thus would be more naturally inclined to speak in sign. The motivation comes from within the individual and their relationship to that action.
For me and learning Japanese, I found that I always wanted to learn a new language than my mother-tongue. Communicating & understanding what seemed like “secret code” was just an exciting idea to me ever since I was a kid, so I always tried to speak in gibberish & nonsense noises to emulate the idea of knowing a language. I loved the idea that different sounds and noises had different meanings to different people. Discovering the ways people think and understand the world is such an exciting thing!
When it came to Japanese, it seemed so different & difficult compared to my own native English; and so the challenge was exciting & intrinsically motivating as well. The more I have learned it though, the more similarities I find it has with English! The fun of learning these similarities has grown into a new intrinsic motivator as I continue. So even if you have no intrinsic motivators yet, that doesn’t mean you can’t develop them as you learn and love the Japanese language, or any other languages you decide to learn. You simply won’t know until you find out~
TLDR; (Or maybe I thought I needed a conclusion paragraph)
When it comes to figuring out why an alien might learn an Earth language, or even why you would learn a language alien to your own way of speaking, it comes down to 2 broadly encompassing factors:
- Extrinsic motivation - what does learning the language help you gain?
- Intrinsic motivation - what about learning the language is enjoyable just because it is?
Sometimes you might have one of these reasons, and sometimes you might have 20. The reasons may blur between the lines of extrinsic and intrinsic motivations; and sometimes you might not have any reason at all yet, but end up finding them along the way as you learn.
And while you might not need to know what your motivators for learning Japanese are, it can serve as a valuable focus point on why you are learning it when you get distracted or frustrated. Now, since you know what sort of things to look for, what are some of your motivators for learning Japanese? If you’re learning another language, what about that one?