I have always loved learning.
I talked about this a little bit in a previous blog post, but that also covered so many inspirations, my love of fantasy, my crazy brain. Here, I want to zoom in on a love of learning, the value of learning, and how amazing it is to learn new things.
It’s ironic that I have always loved learning, ever since I was a little kid. Because I did not like going to school. And my grades often struggled not because I didn’t understand the material, but because I’d often forget to do my homework. And when that wasn’t because of playing video games or watching TV or playing outside, it was because I spent way too much time studying non-school things.
When I was a kid, we had a full encyclopedia set, I don’t know what brand or publisher or year of publication, I don’t remember those details. But it was a really slick, sleek, high-quality hardcover set of twenty-something volumes, often with pictures to go with the dense textual entries.
And I read every. Single. Volume. Cover to cover, word for word. From the really interesting stuff, like animal behaviors and weather phenomena, to the ultra-mundane stuff, like the population, climate, square mileage, and other rote statistics regarding just about every major city in the world. I’d sit at my desk, notebook open, just taking notes on everything that interested me. And this was when I was a very young child, eight, nine, ten, thereabouts. “Taking notes” was, honest to goodness, one of my favorite hobbies as a kid. Through high school and even college, I would go through notebooks almost faster than I could buy more. That started to taper off into adulthood as I started doing almost everything on Microsoft Word, email threads to myself, and Scrivener projects (which is a fantastic software for writers, seriously, check it out. It's an organizational dream come true). But the notebooks have started coming back! I’ve started writing things down again, and that’s reminded me of what I’ve missed with the convenience and speed of typing on a computer and organizing files into folders.
Your brain just works differently when you write stuff down. The way I take notes is wildly different with pen and paper (not pencils, I’m left-handed, I got sick of staining the side of my hand with graphite) compared to how I take notes on my computer. That goes for sketching out story ideas and brainstorming, as well as for just writing down interesting things I’ve learned.
So! What’s so great about learning? And what kinds of things have I been learning lately?
Let’s start with the second question, because that helps illuminate the answer to the first. Recently, I’ve been on a total space-kick. It’s a reawakening of what fascinated me as a child — my first love was dinosaurs (which contributed heavily to my early excellence in spelling and pronunciation, a lot of those names are challenging for a child!), but it wasn’t long before space captivated my young mind. In that blog post I mentioned, I talked about how, alongside our encyclopedia set, when I was a kid our family also had this whole binder full of little “brochures” that talked about various space-related concepts. From observable facts about each of the planets, their moons, stars, space technology, to conceptual theoretical elements like space colonies, faster-than-light travel, and potential alien species, there was so much to excite a young, creative mind, and to awaken that same mind to the immense breadth of wonder there is in the universe.
And recently, I’ve returned back to that same amazement. Technology has come so far since I was a kid, and now we have amazing radio images of the center of our galaxy, a brand new space telescope that is taking clearer pictures of the depths of the universe than ever before, there’s a new solar sailer in the works that, if it succeeds, will travel to another star system and take pictures and measurements of its planets in just twenty years (how crazy is that?), we’ve sent a probe to orbit the Sun and take images and readings from closer to the Sun than ever before (you can even zoom in to insane detail on this ultra-high-resolution image of the entire Sun), and we’re even close to putting people on the Moon again — and preparing to send humans all the way to Mars in the next decade! For someone who wasn’t alive during the Space Race of the past, who didn’t get to sit in front of his TV set in awe of the first journey to the Moon, this is a dream come true. We haven’t put a person on the Moon since over twenty years before I was born! And now, all of a sudden, we’re on the cusp of revitalizing that incredible feat of exploration and discovery.
There is a wealth of incredible wonder here on this planet we call home, enough to study and learn new things about for a lifetime. And yet out there, beyond our atmosphere, in the great unknown, there’s a whole universe that we know so little about. Every new discovery is astonishing and incredible. From neutron stars that aren’t even as big as New York City but have hundreds of times the density of our own sun, to the recent discovery of a “twin” to Jupiter in another star system, to the phenomenon of gravitational lensing that warps light to see things in a whole new way, to just so much more, it’s all astonishing, there’s so much to learn, and there’ll never stop being new and amazing discoveries out there beyond our planet. It really makes you realize just how big the universe is, and the knowledge that there is always something new to discover is really inspiring.
Then there are things closer to home. I’ve always been fascinated by languages, but didn’t really click with either French or Spanish in high school. It’s only recently that I started exploring learning another language, and started taking my first steps into two: Japanese and ASL (American Sign Lanuage). Japanese just made sense, I love anime, I play a lot of Japanese video games, and I’ve just always really enjoyed the language, just listening to it without understanding it. When I started reading about the challenges in Japanese-to-English translation in my favorite video games, shows, and manga, I wanted to learn more, to better understand all that goes into it, and the big differences between the languages.
And ASL is equally fascinating because it’s a whole new way of understanding language — speaking without speaking. I’ve had very limited exposure to the deaf, mute, and hard-of-hearing in my life. But even when the majority of my exposure has been through TV shows rather than real life, it’s given me an interest in learning this very unique form of communication.
Both languages also have intriguing grammatical differences from spoke English. Japanese has a “post-positional” grammatical structure, so if you word-for-word translated a sentence that means “The cat is on the box,” it would come out looking like “The cat box on top of is.” You have to rethink how you construct sentences when learning a new language with a new grammatical system. On top of that, there are plenty of words that just don’t translate into English, including a number of “honorifics” attached to names to denote various levels of respect, intimacy, familiarity, deference, and the like. It is a fascinating language that reflects a completely different culture, and I’m excited to learn more.
ASL, meanwhile, is very context-heavy in its grammar. It follows a similar grammatical order of words to English, going Subject-Verb-Object, but there is a lot that is missing, plenty of words that you don’t sign, that are just understood. And it works, which is the crazy thing. Words that we use constantly in writing and everyday speech just aren’t necessary in ASL. And one thing I never knew about ASL, only just learning as I’ve started learning it, is how important facial expressions are in sign language. I thought it was all hand gestures, but that’s just part of it.
I’m still very much a beginner in both languages, so I’m sure I got some details wrong, wasn’t perfectly exact in my explanations, and there are always funky exceptions to every rule when it comes to language. I’m still learning, and committed to learning more!
But the thing that I love about learning both of these languages is how they are windows into completely different cultures, mindsets, and ways of communicating. When you only know one language, you only know one way to talk, to communicate, to relate to other people. The “language barrier” isn’t just not knowing the vocabulary. It’s a real cultural hurdle to understanding a different way of thinking, of living, of understanding the world. So learning a new language helps broaden your perspective on the world, to see beyond your bubble, however big or small it is. The idea of “one language” to connect all peoples is compelling, but there is value in a variety of languages. The fact that not all words translate perfectly into every language is already a tell — when you get into the varying grammatical structures and rules, as well as the cultural influences and historical context behind each individual language, it seems to me that there shouldn’t ever be “one language to rule them all.” Have one language be the most common, for ease of connecting between different people for commercial and educational purposes, sure — English is doing just fine for that.
But for all of us native English speakers, there is so much value to learning other languages. English is a fantastic language, I love it. But it isn’t all that there is. Don’t limit your horizons, or insulate your perspective of the world. Stretch yourself! Challenge yourself! It’s hard to say words and use sounds that your native language doesn’t ask of you, and trying to rewire your brain to another language’s rules can be frustrating. But you don’t have to chase fluency. Just learning a little can already give you a peek into a whole other world. And maybe that tiny glimpse will inspire you to open that door further, to take even just one step into that world, and discover something incredible that you never realized existed.
Charlemagne said, “To have another language is to possess a second soul.” There’s a lot of truth to that.
That’s what makes learning more than just knowledge. That’s where the title of this post comes from. Learning enriches the mind, absolutely. But more than that, it enriches the soul. Languages connect us to different cultures, perspectives, and peoples. Sciences connect us to the physical world around us, above us, beyond us, and have played such a valuable role in the exploration and adventurous spirit that have brought humanity to so many of its exceptional discoveries. History helps us know where we came from, to understand how people have changed over time, but also how they have stayed the same, and be a valuable guiding force to help us not only avoid repeating the mistakes of the past, but also to recapture things that we sometimes lose in our thirst to reach ever new horizons. Even math is a valuable force in architecture, space exploration, cartography, meteorology, economics, and more. Math can help us make sense of things that seem unexplainable, can help us organize our resources, plan for the future, understand the past and present, and even reach for the stars — mathematical computations have played a massive role in both space exploration and mapping our galaxy and the space beyond, and math is such an integral part of every bit of technology we use on a daily basis.
Learning changes us. “Ignorance is bliss,” the saying goes. And, I mean, if “bliss,” which is defined as “perfect happiness; great joy” is a state of not knowing things, of not understanding things, then, uh… yeah, I’m not on board with that saying. Yes, knowing more can sometimes be upsetting. There are things we don’t want to know, don’t need to know. “Oversharing” is definitely widespread in the modern internet age, where everyone can just dump their ideas, great and, uh, not so great, out into the world for everyone to see. But learning, I believe, provides greater joy than ignorance ever can. There is just too much of value all around us and beyond us to seal ourselves in a bubble and learn as little as possible. Yes, there are horrible people in this world. But there are also wonderful, amazing, incredible people in this world, and if we seal ourselves off in fear or revulsion towards the not-so-great people in the world, we miss out on every beautiful opportunity to meet someone amazing, someone who will enrich our lives and bring us greater joy than we could get on our own. And sometimes people we think are horrible are just making a poor first impression. You’ll never know if you don’t take the chance to know them!
As a writer, I think the value of learning for writers is rather self-evident. But specifically as a fantasy writer, learning is really powerful as a way to ignite my imagination. The more I know, the more possibilities I realize in the world. And fantasy really finds all of its origins in the real world. All those almost one thousand Pokémon? Yeah, they’re pretty much all fantastical takes on real-world animals, technological concepts, or household items. Magic often comes from simply asking “Hey, what if we could do stuff that’s impossible in the real world, or do really challenging real-world stuff really easily?” All of your favorite fantastical creatures, castles, weapons, magical abilities, and awe-inspiring worlds found their inspiration somewhere in the real world. It’s not always conscious, and a lot of the times we’re just throwing together a whole bunch of weird stuff in a crazy hodgepodge that doesn’t have one clear inspiration at its core, but it all comes from this amazing reality that we live in, and dreaming of what else might be possible. And learning about theoretical concepts that haven’t seen the light of day also helps! I’ve been reading so much about space elevators and orbital rings, this stuff is so cool, just imagining those existing in the real world and the possibilities that would result from their existence is crazy-exciting. There’s so much to learn, from the actual to the theoretical, and so much of it is so incredibly fascinating.
So don’t be afraid! Go out there and learn stuff! Your life, your imagination, and your relationships will be richer because of it.