[Morgawr]

I help around Japanese language learning communities and one of the core tenets of a successful "language learning career" is being able to enjoy doing stuff with the language without necessarily trying to learn the language. Learning the language becomes a byproduct of having fun with it.

For this reason, I have this kind of conversation almost daily with people asking for help in studying or just ways to "find motivation", etc. I always ask them "Why are you learning Japanese?".

The amount of answers I get that revolve around the idea of "I want to get better at it" always amaze me. I'm the kind of person that just does things because I want to have fun. I learned Japanese because I enjoy doing stuff in Japanese. I never cared about learning Japanese, it just happened that doing so made it fun for me in the process. And yet there's people out there whose entire goal of learning Japanese is to "learn Japanese"... I will personally never understand that mentality myself, it's very puzzling.

[wink]

Maybe that's lost in the brevity of answers of the people you talked to, but some things I know I only have fun doing when I'm (moderately) good at it. Talking to someone in a different language and having to think about every second word is not fun. Being able to talk and only having to think about a word every few sentences is fun. Same for sports or whatever activity. You think you like it but you're so bad that it's not fun. You try to improve in order to have fun.

[Brian_K_White]

Then the goal was all the things the language enables, not the language itself. You want to talk with people who speak that language. You want to function in an environment written in that language.

Even a language theorist researcher who learns a language just to study the language itself with no practical use planned, is still learning it for some other rrason, which is to study it's rules and construction and correlate that with other languages and information systems etc.

Even someone who learns a language not to use it and not even to study it, but merely as mental excercise, has that other reason, mental excercise.

[wink]

> You want to talk with people who speak that language

No, there's a good chance I can talk to those people in a common language, mostly English. I didn't say my explanation was valid for 100% of the cases, only that it's a bit like that for me and there's a chance other people feel the same.

"I want to talk to people" and "I want to talk to people in their native language when I visit their country" are related, not a complete match. And honestly, I think that borders on overanalyzing. I am sure I am learning languages because I have fun doing it, but I also have fun having mastered a certain level.

[Brian_K_White]

I agree that the two are different, and the latter is still a distinct reason.