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Benvenuti, Bienvenue, Croeso and Welcome.
Hi, I’m Juliet. Join me on my language learning journey and discover my thoughts on different aspects of language learning with the A Language Learning Tale Podcast. Today I’m talking about…
IS LANGUAGE LEARNING A GAME?
If you need to learn in a gamified way, are you actually committed to learning, or the game?
Gamifying of things, not just languages, is done to give you little rushes of excitement, dopamine, by creating achievements and awards and - we all know what I’m talking about here - leagues. The reason we have gamification at all comes from the fact that we learn, as children, through play. This is very apparent to even the most casual of observers. Therefore, this is considered to be a part of our make-up as human beings and, thus, gamification of, it seems everything, has become widespread.
Okay, I buy that. But adults aren’t kids. Yes, many play competitive games, or watch them, and get really het up about them, but not everyone is like that.
So, how does gamification fit into motivation? Because that’s what it’s there for - to motivate. There are two types of motivation. There’s the type that comes from within, that’s called instrinsic motivation. If you’re intrinsically motiviated, you’ll likely get your little rushes of satisfaction just from realising you’ve finally understood a grammatical construction, or remembered a difficult word. A thing that’s just a part of learning. Gamification, on the other hand, is an extrinsic motivation. It means the motivation comes from something external, like gettting rewards for doing something, which might be badges, or points, or motivational messages, or lives. These are what keep you going.
Now, I have to jump in here again and say, I get very little motivation from extrinsic rewards. My dopamine rushes, if that’s what they are, come from when I realise I’ve understood something. And I’m sure most people have varying levels of both intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, not just gamification. Extrinsic could be the fact that you want to go and live in a country, or read the literature. Those things are the rewards, but I doubt they count as dopamine rushes.
But let’s go back to my question. If you need to learn in a gamified way, are you actually committed to learning, or the game?
Okay, so I use Duolingo to get the basic bones of the language. I don’t care about leagues, I don’t care about streaks. The animations annoy me, so I turn them off. The motivational messages annoy me, so I turn them off. I use the least possible gamification in the app. I don’t need that to learn. For me, it hinders learning. It takes my mind off the actual goal, learning a language.
But if you have all those things turned on, does that make you not a language learner, but a gamer? No, of course not. If you like the motivational messages and the animations amuse you, leave them on. If keeping track of your learning by maintaining a streak helps to keep you going, okay - as long as you don’t cheat and use streak freezes to pretend you have a streak. That’s cheating yourself. However, leagues, I do have a problem with those. As soon as you get something where people are gaming the gamification, by doing easy tasks to gain more points and, well, there are lots of ways to cheat, then it becomes about something else than language learning. Then, it feels like you’re not committed to languages, just gaming.
There will be lots of people who disagree with me on this.
Look, I think a certain level of gamification does have a place in language learning, I’m not saying it doesn’t, but anything that makes you concentrate on something that isn’t the learning, that seems, to me, to be a step too far.
So, is language learning a game? If it helps you, yes, but maybe don’t take it to the limit.
That’s all for today’s episode. Don’t forget to join me again next time, for more language learning tips, tricks and tales and in the meantime, check out the A Language Learning Tale YouTube channel for additional, non-podcast content.
Ciao, salut, hwyl and bye for now.