Regarding learning a foreign language, I’m not sure what I can say. I speak Japanese, and I run a company which makes some top selling Japanese language learning products. So I know something about this topic. You’re right, learning a foreign language is a big commitment. So isn’t it obvious that the longer the required commitment, the most likely it is that people will drop out?
Yes. It’s very obvious. Which is why it’s that much more unusual that people make these commitments without more consideration than they tend to put forward. People will intuit that they should do some significant (meaning more than a couple hours) hard research into whether or not it’s worth it to get their masters, and where to get it; they tend not to realize that successfully learning a language as remote as Mandarin requires similar time investment as getting the masters degree, even though a necessary part of any plan to do so would be to figure that out, and I don’t know why. I suspect that many of these people are just going through the motions with no real objectives in mind, and that’s a running theme of my OP.
In the case of learning a foreign language, maybe over time the quitter just decided that the effort was no longer worth it. Maybe that want to prioritize other hobbies and interests. Or maybe they just don’t enjoy memorizing hanzi. Maybe the idea moving to China or the important of talking to people in Chinese has lost its luster. What’s wrong with changing your mind about these things?
As you say, nothing. The problem, at least in hindsight, was the decision to start in the first place. You can say the decision was correct given the information they had, but I’m trying to make the point that much (most?) of the time this is clearly not the case, and people engage in studying habits that will not ensure they learn the language in the next forty years.
Which is not to say that people shouldn’t use your product or service. I personally think language acquisition has some pretty significant positive externalities—languages are more useful the more people speak them, after all—but we don’t even need to go there. It’s just that the way most people set about learning them often implies they’re not even trying, to a degree that’s difficult to make sense of, at least for me.
Yes. It’s very obvious. Which is why it’s that much more unusual that people make these commitments without more consideration than they tend to put forward. People will intuit that they should do some significant (meaning more than a couple hours) hard research into whether or not it’s worth it to get their masters, and where to get it; they tend not to realize that successfully learning a language as remote as Mandarin requires similar time investment as getting the masters degree, even though a necessary part of any plan to do so would be to figure that out, and I don’t know why. I suspect that many of these people are just going through the motions with no real objectives in mind, and that’s a running theme of my OP.
As you say, nothing. The problem, at least in hindsight, was the decision to start in the first place. You can say the decision was correct given the information they had, but I’m trying to make the point that much (most?) of the time this is clearly not the case, and people engage in studying habits that will not ensure they learn the language in the next forty years.
Which is not to say that people shouldn’t use your product or service. I personally think language acquisition has some pretty significant positive externalities—languages are more useful the more people speak them, after all—but we don’t even need to go there. It’s just that the way most people set about learning them often implies they’re not even trying, to a degree that’s difficult to make sense of, at least for me.
thought of you!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhcvejeAB0E