: Re: How to show characters learning something in a non-boring way? Okay so I want to write a fiction where a character is learning something, for example a language, such as Japanese. I want to

@Jamie945

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If most of the book revolves around learning or training, this would be considered performance fiction. Most of the novels is this genre will have analogies you can play off of. According to the Story Grid genres, good examples of subgenres are:

Sports
Art
Music
Business

One way to integrate a learning environment in writing would be to start each chapter with an excerpt from the book being studied. Jurassic Park does this with excerpts from a chaos theory book written by the character Dr. Malcolm. Frank Herbert's Dune probably does this even better, though I don't recall it as well.

Sadly, it is much harder to find other examples of performance fiction, like The Imitation Game.

Looking at the Japanese example specifically, the language borrows a lot from other languages, just like English. In fact, Japanese is a third Japanese, a third Chinese, and a third English. Chinese can be seen in the kanji and on-yomi readings. More importantly, the katakana alphabet, used entirely for foreign words, is 99% English. Learning katakana's use could be an interesting revelation for the character, similar to the scenes in fiction about research. Kanji has a similar revelation point: When a new word is encountered composed of two characters already studied, the learner can make a close approximation of the new word's meaning, despite having never seen it before. For example, 食堂 is composed of "eat" and "hall", meaning "cafeteria".

James Clavell's Shogun is not performance fiction, but learning Japanese plays a particularly significant role in the story.

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