Pretend to be a Japanese Student

I invented an infinite game for language learning

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I invented a game. It's called Pretend to be a Japanese student. Depending on viewpoint, you could also call it my personal strategy for passing the highest level of the Japanese Language Proficiency Test, the JLPT N1.

To explain how I came up with this particular game, let me take you back to summer 2022, when I took the second-highest level, the N2. The day after the exam, a Japanese friend thumbed through my university textbooks that I had used for review, and remarked that Japanese students would read texts like these in junior high school (age 12-15). He meant it as a compliment but as someone with a lot of pride in her language skills, I felt mildly insulted, even challenged. If my Japanese was at junior high school level, my next goal would be to raise it to high school level!

Fast forward one and a half years, I am working in Japan and am considering taking the N1 as a personal challenge. I enjoy studying but the notion of buying yet another set of textbooks geared towards passing a single exam that tests passive knowledge (reading and listening) with questionable every-day applicability, made me tired before I had even spent a single yen. Now that I had so many resources at my fingertips, I wanted to study for the N1 but I also wanted to have fun and learn more about my personal interests while I was at it.

It wasn't a conscious decision. One day, I simply went out and bought a Japanese intro to high school physics book. Why physics? As you might remember from my collection of Resources for Science Fiction Writers, I became interested in physics when I started writing science fiction. I wanted to learn the basics my high school physics teacher failed to teach and I was in the mood to read nonfiction rather than fiction. It doesn't hurt that Japanese textbooks are designed to appeal, with pastel colours, key terms boldened and underlined, and illustrations featuring cute animals in place of humans.

The bear explains inertia.

Fast forward another two weeks, I discover an intro to economics book in my little train station bookshop and buy that too. With this second book, I get to cram my head with vocabulary like industrial revolution, capitalism, communist manifesto, monopoly, profit, and social inequality—which I enjoy learning about as well.

Don’t the covers make you want to cram some knowledge into your brain?

At that point, I was reminded of a quote from The Almanack of Naval Ravikant that resonated immediately when I first read it.

No book in the library should scare you. Whether it‘s a math, physics, electrical engineering, sociology, or economics book. You should be able to take any book down off the shelf and read it. A number of them are going to be too difficult for you. That‘s okay - read them anyway. Then go back and reread them and reread them.

Why not strive for that goal—but in Japanese instead of German or English? Reading and writing have always been my main vehicles for language learning. Whatever I can read and write about, I will eventually be able to use in daily conversation as well. I might even write short practice essays in Japanese and find a tutor to correct them.

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These musings are incredibly niche but if there's one universal takeaway, it is this: Always look for ways to gamify whatever you want or need to do in life. Whether it's learning a new language or skill, exercise, healthy eating or something completely different, when you find a way to make the activity itself fun, you will never have to rely on extrinsic motivation to keep doing it. This is the difference between a finite and an infinite game¹.

There are at least two kinds of games. One could be called finite, the other infinite. A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play.

When it comes to language learning, the best way is finding something that plays to your personal interests, that you want to be able to experience or consume in that language. With your study plan reflecting that, you will keep coming back to the desk to learn more about what you are interested in. And if your interests change, all you have to do is get new learning resources.

You could even go one step further and change your self-image, the way you think of yourself, to reflect the activity in question. This technique can be applied to any habit you wish to adopt. Want to exercise regularly? Tell yourself you are healthy and fit over and over again until you've convinced yourself of your new identity.

Want to understand Japanese in a variety of advanced contexts? Pretend to be a Japanese high school student studying for their final exams.

The key is finding an image that feels cool and alluring to you personally. It’s the playful nature of this technique that makes it fun. Who hasn’t played some games of pretend as a child?

For me, aesthetics help too. Ironically, it was only after leaving university that I fell in love with the study aesthetic: libraries, turtleneck sweaters, too much coffee, dog-eared and pencil-marked paperbacks, scribbling into leather notebooks with fountain pens. Admittedly, Japan has a more complicated relationship with studying and academic excellence but I was nevertheless delighted to spot people (not only students) with their noses buried in textbooks, novels or nonfiction books on the train, in cafés and other public places. They serve as reminders of my love for Japanese and for learning.

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I will continue to study physics, economics, and any other topic I'm curious about in Japanese. What about you? Which new identity have you adopted recently or are hoping to adopt in order to change something about yourself?

1. For more on these concepts, I recommend Finite and Infinite Games by James Carse.