Almost every language app today tries to tap into your psychology to keep you engaged. Duolingo does this through “gamification,” motivating you to study by completing levels, obtaining badges, earning virtual currency (RIP Lingots), and competing (and beating) other app users in your league. Gamification works because it taps into the reward center of the brain and gives you a nice dopamine rush that keeps you coming back for more. Other apps may use different gamification methods to hack your psychology, whether by fostering a feeling of belonging in a supportive Discord community, or rewarding you with aesthetics, like gorgeous digital art just for participating.
All of these “psychology hacks” have the same thing in common: using something other than your intrinsic desire to learn a language to get you engaged with language learning. While extrinsic motivation is not enough to sustain a journey to fluency, it can be extremely useful for getting you started and keeping you on track to your goals. In other domains of life, we often hack our own psychology to accomplish our goals: rewarding ourselves with a break after studying, a smoothie/protein shake after a workout, or new accessories after reaching our monthly savings goals.
While hacking your psychology is not a bad thing in itself, the problem is that most language-learning apps hack your psychology to keep you using their app, not to help you become fluent. Because apps are incentivized to keep you engaged on their app so they make as much money as possible, they resort to psychology hacks that feel tantamount to straight up manipulation. And when you encounter these tactics, it can make language learning feel like a chore instead of the joy it should be.
If you have tried to quit the owl after using Duolingo for multiple months, you’ll know what I mean. Duolingo deliberately taps into loss aversion to stress you out by warning that you will lose “your streak.” This can lead you to continue using the app, even when it no longer provides any substantive benefits to your language learning. This is similar to how meeting a target number of steps each day can become a compulsion, guilting you into walking around your bedroom at night to achieve your goals. But unlike a fitness goal, the only person benefitting from Duolingo’s psychology hacks is the owl.
While psychology hacks are often thrust upon language learners in a way that ultimately prevents language learning, it doesn’t have to be this way. There is another way of hacking your own psychology that will foster an intrinsic motivation to learn a language and that does not rely on your negative emotions for motivation.
This is the psychology of kicking ass.
If you’re like most people, you have already encountered the psychology of kicking ass, even if you have not recognized it. If you have a natural talent for something, whether it’s a sport, playing an instrument, cooking, math, or something else, you will naturally be drawn to spend more time engaging in that activity. The reason is simple: it feels good to be good at something. And it’s only natural to want to spend time on an activity that feels good.
This leads to a positive feedback cycle where the more time you spend on the activity, the better you get at it, the more it feels good to do it, and the more you desire to engage in the activity. The psychology of kicking ass is this positive feedback cycle of intrinsic motivation that propels you to mastery. While it may seem that this powerful feedback cycle is limited to those activities you are naturally gifted at, this is actually not the case.
The only requirement is that you start kicking ass at the activity. Or at least feel that you do.
Fortunately, even if you are a total beginner at something, there is a way to artificially create the feeling that you are kicking ass: by achieving goals you set for yourself over and over again. If you consistently accomplish your goals in a given activity, it’s only natural that you will feel great while engaging in it. But what goals should you set to foster this feeling? The answer: ridiculously easy goals that are completely within your control.
As language learners, it’s all too easy to make our goals results-based—I want to start reading manga in Japanese by this date, I want to be able to understand a full episode of 鋼の錬金術師 without subtitles in 2 years, or (for the かな nerds) I want to learn all the 常用漢字 in 12 months.
While results-based goals can help you determine where to spend your time, they are not good for hacking into the psychology of kicking ass. The reason is that results often don’t come consistently or at the arbitrary pace we set. We are often overly ambitious with our desires to learn and it’s easy to forget just how long it takes to learn a language. When you miss your results-based goals, you get the opposite feeling of kicking ass: the feeling that you suck. And if you get that feeling, say goodbye to your motivation.
Instead of results-based goals, set goals based on what you can control: your effort. And specifically, set your goal to minimum viable effort, which will make consistently achieving your goal as easy as possible. Minimum viable effort may seem like it’s the worst goal to set. After all, how can putting in 15 minutes a day make you feel like you are kicking ass? How could such a laughably small goal make you feel victorious?
But the reason you’ll feel like your kicking ass for putting in minimum viable effort is because you will be. By achieving your goal of consistently studying a measly 15 minutes a day, you will start to see big results that are undeniable.
Anyone who has put in 15 minutes a day to learn a language consistently over a period of months will know just how far minimum viable effort can take you. In fact, if you follow a high-torque learning approach, you can go from 0 knowledge of Japanese to reading manga in less than a year. These are no small results, which is why setting your goal to minimum viable effort will allow you to hack the psychology of kicking ass.
So stop letting Duo the owl hack your psychology to keep you caged in a pre-fluency trap. Set your goal to minimum viable effort, take a high-torque approach to learning, and unlock the psychology of kicking ass. If you do, you’ll be kicking ass in your target language sooner than you can believe.