2026-01-09
7 分钟Today I want to talk about language fitness.
Someone asked me, Steve, what's more important in language learning?
Intensity or perseverance?
And this made me think of, you know, physical training.
You sometimes do very intense workouts.
You train for sprinting and yet at other times it's more sort of an anaerobic activity jogging.
And I think this has application for language learning and I thought about you know,
the way I have learned different languages and I think of periods where I went through very intense,
you know, levels of activity and other periods when I just enjoyed the language.
I can see it in sort of three different ways.
First of all, of course, there is a need for intense activity.
There is this heavy and learning neurons that fire together, wire together.
We have to create some degree of intensity and repetition.
However, this quickly loses effectiveness.
The more we repeat, the less we learn, the less motivated we become.
And it turns out that the dopamine effect of this intense learning and repetition is different from the dopamine effect of more enjoyable,
engaging with the language, engaging with things of interest.
If I am reading a book or listening to a novel or a history narration in the language I'm learning all along,
I'm enjoying discovering, learning new things.
And so there are lots of periods of sort of dopamine and that's sort of an intrinsic sense of satisfaction and enjoyment.