Language Learning and Habit Hobbling

February 14, 2021

Over the past few weeks, as winter drags on and new COVID strains proliferate, I’ve spent more of my free time engaged in language learning, specifically Spanish and French. The former is more of a practicality, considering after years of classes in school and a summer working en un laboratorio de microbiología and taking clases de español para los medicos in Santander, a sunny city on the north coast of Spain,I am a certified bilingual medical provider; staying fresh with skills allows me to retain confidence that I am communicating accurately and safely con mis pacientes hispanohablantes. The latter is, at first glance, more of a frivolity, an exercise thus far mostly in learning what Voulez-vous coucher avec moi, c’est soir? and Prêt à Manger have meant all along (really, a British company named itself “ready to eat” en Français? Must’ve been pre-Brexit…); I suppose if I were writing the résumé version of this activity, I would say I were doing it to build empathy with patients who do not speak English, but the truth lies closer to the fact that diversion was my first aim and the latter is but a lucky side-effect. In any case, while my Spanish practice has involved a mishmash of podcasts, online noticias en español to practice reading the news, and short stories, I’ve learned French almost exclusively though the satisfyingly-gamified Duolingo, an interactive language-learning app that makes getting through lessons on the present tense conjugation of vouloir and the names of the days of the week…rather addicting, rather than dry and plodding, as rule-laden foreign language classes can become if not taught in an engaging way. Indeed, virtually any time I’ve told someone who is not fluent in Spanish that I use Spanish to communicate with patients, the response I hear is “oh that’s great, you know I took xx language for yy years in school but never really kept up with it…”. This caused me to reflect for a moment: what did I find so addictive about Duolingo, and what lessons did that imply for how to create effective virtual didactics in our ongoing pandemic season?

In reflecting on these questions, I must admit my thinking has been influenced by two books that have recently frequented my bedside table: “Atomic Habits” by James Clear and “The Organized Mind” by Daniel Levitin. The former has more to do with how to game one’s own psychology to make good habits enticing and bad habits undesirable, while the latter is a broader commentary on human (in)attention and the merits of organizing – and thereby simplifying – one’s life in order to spend more of our time focused on the tasks we care about and less of it wondering where we left our keys and if there’s something else on our to-do list we’ve forgotten to, well, do. Notwithstanding the differences in scope and focus of both books, both authors highlight time and again the fact that in this increasingly digitized world, our attention is constantly hijacked by novel stimuli, particularly when the immediate result of distracting ourselves is a small hit of dopamine – a text, a like, an email we can rapidly delete to feel “productive”, and so on. Levitin cited the impressive, if not shocking, research that in experimental settings, simply the knowledge one has an unread email reduces one’s functional IQ by an average of 10 points. He then goes on to point out that “multitasking” is a myth – our brains evolved to focus on one task at a time, and in fact switching from one task to another is an act of using up sugar in the brain, taking precious energy, yet at the same time reinforcing this maladaptive behavior because of the dopaminergic reward associated with novelty. In so doing, we can easily become addicted to switching superficially between tasks, only to find ourselves mentally exhausted after an hour of work without having made any meaningful progress on any one of our goals. How many times have I opened up a manuscript or a personal project, only to become distracted by a text message, only to realize that 20 minutes have passed and I already feel like quitting, but have written a grand total of three sentences? Too many to count (particularly if I get interrupted while attempting to do so). One of Clear’s theses, then, is that since we cannot change our novelty-addicted biology, we might as well harness it to build in habits we want to cultivate. That is, in order to make good behavior a habit, we must have positive associations with those behaviors, or it will be difficult, if not impossible, to harness the willpower to perform such a task except by external obligation.

The genius of Duolingo, then, is its pairing of a desired outcome – increased linguistic skills – to the addicting devices now ubiquitous in our pockets, desks, beds…our entire lives, depressingly enough. To Clear’s point of making the new habit an enjoyable one, Duolingo (1) starts the learner at an appropriate level of difficulty and (2) endows even the most incremental progress with ample positive feedback. To the first point, there is thankfully the option of a baseline aptitude test to help more experienced learners find their niche in the sweet spot midway between impossible challenge and simplistic boredom. For the total novice such as myself when learning French, the initial level of difficulty was at times absurdly easy, asking me to identify cognates and/or simple words that are accompanied by an illustration of their meaning. It was quick enough to get through these exercises, however, and, to the second point, the experience was made enjoyable by an upbeat chime with each correct answer, plus a green progress bar that gradually filled with each correct answer. This was then reinforced by more game-like elements, such as collecting experience points with continued lessons, allowing for friendly competition among learners, “unlocking” new levels of learning with additional successful practice, and encouragement to keep up a daily habit by creating a “streak”, that is, positive reinforcement for consecutive days of practice. And within moments the difficulty increased slightly, first to having me translate short sentences from French to English using a word bank, then vice-versa, then eventually selecting words that match those spoken by a native French speaker, before ultimately requiring me to free-text my responses to build in elements of forced recall rather than simple recognition. The ramp-up in difficulty was sufficiently gradual that at no point did I feel overwhelmed, but instead found myself somewhere near the apex of my personal Yerkes-Dodson stress curve, appropriately stimulated without hanging my head in defeat.

Duolingo’s facilitation of achieving a very gradually progressive mastery – even of a very rudimentary sort after just several days of practice, like being able to count to ten, name the days of the week, or understand the meaning of je ne suis un chat in response to a hilarious Zoom lawyer meme – allowed me to escape the negative self-talk typically associated with being a novice at any skill. For of course I cannot yet listen to a movie in French and understand what was being said; at present, I could hardly ask for the bathroom (Où…sont…les…toilettes?)! But while I would never expect an infant to be able to pull off such a linguistic feat within weeks or even months, somehow my more-educated (that is to say, more primed, less imaginative) brain has a tendency to assume that if I am not immediately “good” at something, then I am simply predestined to be “bad” at is; that is, I mistake a lack of deliberate practice for a lack of innate ability. In so doing, I can easily adopt a maladaptive “fixed” mindset in which expectations of my own failure produce exactly that outcome: since I am someone who does not know much French, I must not be “good” at French, and therefore cannot expect to learn more – and our prophecy of failure thus fulfills itself.

By contrast, the incremental challenge and positive reinforcement I’ve found in Duolingo has helped me adopt a “growth” mindset in which initial difficulties are seen as opportunities for improvement rather than fundamental flaws. In so doing, it has been easier to accept my mistakes as an expected part of expanding my knowledge base beyond where it currently resides, and to take my mishaps as what they were – evidence of room for improvement on a given skill, rather than evidence of my fundamental ineptitude as a human. The cynicism within me cries out to say – but isn’t adopting a growth mindset merely playing Pollyanna, focusing on the good to a fault, ignoring the obviously bad? But, to again reference one of Clear’s theses, the point of a growth mindset is not in evaluating where you are, but rather where you’re headed. Think of it this way – who is more likely to keep up with French lessons, and therein learn French over the course of the upcoming months and years – the student who has no particular knack for language-learning, but who sees herself as capable of learning just a bit more every day no matter her current state of knowledge, or the student who is actually quite gifted in English linguistics and wordplay, but who cannot tolerate the ego-dystonic experience of attempting to muddle through a language in which he presently has no impressive competence.

That is, if we are to improve at anything, we must stop seeing ourselves as people who are a given way, but rather people who can become a certain way. To cite the obvious, on my first day of medical school, I hadn’t the first idea of many of even the most common diseases – I remember one of our instructors mentioned a patient having a “STEMI” and I felt anxiety surge within my soul as impostor syndrome took its hold. Fast-forward seven years, and I now answer some calls in the middle of the night about routine issues without even having to turn on the light (anyone who has ordered – and anxiously double-checked – a platelet transfusion on hour 21 of a shift knows what I mean here). To cite another, I have not kept up with writing much in residency and would hardly consider myself a prolific “writer”, but after getting positive feedback on some of the pieces I’ve written, I have decided to set aside time a few distraction-free times per week just to let myself write – just for ten minutes, to see what I could come up with…and suddenly, an hour later, I find I’ve written several hundred words simply from allowing my work to flow from me without judgment. While of course the neurotic-still-somehow-a-pre-med-perfectionist within me wants everything I write to be…perfect, I have come to recognize that I am far more likely to produce a quality work of writing if sit down and write rather than sit down and agonize about how I’m not a good writer. For even in the process of the few weeks of deliberate writing practice I’ve engaged in, I’ve noticed how much easier it is to come up with ideas about what to write about and to expand on them – a virtuous cycle, a serial bonding of individual atomic ideas into molecules of substance, to borrow Clear’s titular metaphor. Moreover, both language learning and reflective writing have become a healthy break from learning medicine. While of course I can (and do) spend hours at a time reading about diseases, pathophysiology, treatment, prevention, and prognosis, at times a reminder that I am a human with diverse interests outside of what’s mandated by the National Board of Medical Examiners or featured in the latest issue of Pediatrics in Review allows me to come back to my medical studies feeling refreshed and better able to engage with the material in a curious, fully present way.

Moving beyond myself and my own studies, in this epoch this epoch wherein it has been increasingly difficult to keep students engaged and motivated in the world of virtual didactics, the insights from Levitin, Clear, and Duolingo make me ponder what we all could be doing to make knowledge acquisition an experience full of positive reinforcement and virtuous cycles rather than grade grubbing and learning by obligation. For indeed, so much of school is based around grades. While evaluation is important, grades have often become the end itself rather than a means to the end. Why? because grades are functionally academic currency, so students are (as I certainly was) afraid of taking classes that would be “too hard” for fear of hurting our GPAs and thereby not getting into the medical school we wanted, not landing the job offer we so deeply desired, and so on. What a tragedy that I may have missed out on learning opportunities (like, for example, taking harder Spanish classes) for fear that my transcript would have been tarnished by anything so ignominious as an A-. While of course I don’t think that grades should be abolished altogether, the next time I am in a role of instruction (as will become increasingly common throughout the next years of my medical career) I will try to keep in mind this insight that learners who feel supported and challenged in a healthy way are far more likely to persist than learners who are bored, challenged at an unreasonable level, or made to feel “less than” for not knowing as much as someone else. Again, I will do my best to focus on where a student is heading rather than where a student is, since the patients that student will take care of over the next decades of their medical career will benefit more from a doctor who learned to learn more each day than the doctor who merely learned to ace the test, even if the latter currently has more medical knowledge than the former.

If you took the time to read this post, then thank you! I would love to hear about your experiences as a learner, your adoption of a growth vs fixed mindset in various contexts, or how you hope to inspire future generations with your passion for making learning a positive experience. I would write more, but, you know, I’d probably study for the boards. Au revoir!