I feel exceptionally lucky to have retained the joy of learning despite the horrors of the high school education system. Contrary to the experience of most people, I enjoyed much of what I studied in high school, even as the curriculums became more exam-centric. I got good grades, but this was mostly a symptom of my enjoyment in learning.

I think I've realised what it was about high school that made me enjoy learning, and it has very real implications for how I learn new things by myself and how I choose mentors to teach me. The idea is basically that of Comprehensible input - a relatively new method for learning languages fluently - and it goes like:

• You start knowing nothing about a language. By whatever means, you memorise fundamental grammar and the most common 1000-2000 words. You'll probably do this by translating new words in the target language (e.g. Japanese) into your native language (e.g. English): ringo (japanese) -> apple (english) -> 🍎 (the idea in your mind).
• Once you reach this threshold, you do your best to stop using your native language as a proxy. This means learning by "comprehensible input", which is "content that you can understand about 75-90% of". If you hadn't learned the word for "apple" in Japanese, you might watch a video where someone holds up various fruits and says "kore ha ringo desu" (while holding an apple) and "kore ha banana desu" (while holding a banana). From this, you are able to infer the words for apple and banana. But notably, you do not encounter the English words for the Japanese words you're learning; your brain stores these new words like: ringo (japanese) -> 🍎 (the idea in your mind).
• You always consume content you like or have a genuine interest in. You might watch content for small children at first, then progress to reading books or watching shows, and eventually progress to news articles and academic journals.

Thanks to mapping new (e.g. Japanese) words to concepts (e.g. 🍎) without your native language in the middle, you should now have the fluency of a native speaker. This permits you to think and feel in your new language rather than being stuck slowly translating back and forth with English.

The thing that I think is special about comprehensible input is this part:

Comprehensible input is when you consume content where you can understand 75-90% of the language used.

I have often said for high school that I only did well because I knew that if I didn't understand the vast majority of the content, class would suck. If I hadn't done the pre-reading or at least attempted the homework, I'd spend the next lesson (which depended on this partial understanding) feeling utterly lost and confused; the whole class became almost useless. This pattern followed me into university, where I stopped attending live lectures when I fell behind, because the time was far better spent on consuming previous missed lectures first. Flipped classrooms are fantastic because they seek to avoid this; your homework is not about what you learned today, but about getting a brief understanding of what you'll learn tomorrow. It's like levelling ground and laying concrete foundations for the house you're about to build tomorrow (out of, uh, some nice metaphor for knowledge), instead of laying the foundations during class and being expected to finish the house by yourself later.

Only while restarting my Japanese study with comprehensible input did I realise that my most enjoyable learning experiences followed this same pattern. For example, in cooking science, the Maillard reaction is responsible for the yummy savoury flavour and brown colour in well-cooked meat, tofu and chips. It occurs at high heat and involves the bonding of amino acids (from proteins) with sugars. While water is inside food (ie the surface of meat or tofu), it can't get much hotter than 100ºC. So therefore, the yummy flavour of steak can be achieved in tofu, but only if you get the water out of the surface (ie by pressing, patting or salting it, then cooking it at high heat). Moreover, it can be used any time you have proteins and sugars, so if you want more varied savoury flavour in your food, you can turn up the heat, cook off the water, then add amino acids (eg amino sauce, soy protein, koji-fermented vegetables) and sugar (eg table sugar, pureed vegetables, honey).

If you don't understand most of the content when you're studying something new, it's like trying to climb a mountain without most of your body weight supported; you're struggling to get a grip, and so your focus is entirely dedicated to finding your next unstable hold, leaving you unable to appreciate the beauty of the valley or the feeling of your body working.

Over the long term, your learning is like an engine that takes content as fuel and returns satisfaction as mileage. If you learn a steady but slow pace, you probably don't get enough joy out, and eventually it stalls. Trying to travel a great distance early on is like trying to go 100kph in first gear; the engine falters from stress and eventually stalls (a metaphorical and perhaps literal burnout). Extending this metaphor to riding a motorcycle, learning to balance and ride safely below 20km/h is very difficult; without momentum, the bike does not assist you very much to stay upright, and so even a gentle shift in your head or shoulders risks toppling the bike over. But once you get comfortable enough to hit 2nd or 3rd gear and go over 20km/h, it's much harder to fall over let alone stall the engine.

The net practical outcome of this is "learn new things one concept at a time", which sounds a bit like no-shit-Sherlock common sense. But I think it's at least a bit deeper than this; when you learn something new, until you understand most of the basics, it will feel really fucking difficult. You should utilise whatever hacks and jetpacks you can to get through this phase; do it with a friend, consume copious amounts of chocolate as you get through your flashcards, vent about what you don't understand until your family is (almost) sick of you. The beginning is hard but temporary.

Because once you get to the point where the start of some content out there - be it movies in a new language, or Wikipedia articles in a new science - is mostly within your understanding, you'll kick into the next gear, your dopamine engine will reward you with practically never-ending joy. You might even continue thinking about it on the toilet by accident. You won't need friends or chocolate anymore (but keep them around for the next first gear).

Making all of your learning "comprehensible" trades the challenge of finding motivation to learn into finding content just beyond your skill-level. I'd take the second problem over the first one any day of the week.

Afterword: addiction to success

One barrier to learning that I inherited from the education system was perfectionism and a fear of trying new things. Something deep inside me feels off when I'm "bad" (or more likely, new and still in first gear) at something, perhaps because I got accustomed to being praised for my grades (rather than for trying hard or sitting with the discomfort of trying something new). While the Fear of failure is very real, this probably just narrowed my focus at school once I was already comfortable in a subject; I did well at maths in early high-school (aka middle school), so I figured I'd do maths in senior high-school, and subsequently figured I'd study maths and computer science at university. Learning to find joy in learning something (e.g. trying new recipes, using the Maillard reaction to make new savoury flavours) versus finding joy in creating something "good" (e.g. my friends enjoying my food) has been a very difficult journey.

So as long as you don't really give a shit about how it turns out, you're probably learning the right thing. I'm a slut for praise, but if praise (e.g. Instagram likes) is the only reason I enjoy doing something, I try to swap it for another hobby.

Easier said than done. But easier remembered after said.