: 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

@Annie587

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"with all the details included" If you mean that literally, then your book will be teaching the reader Japanese. Which probably won't make for an interesting novel. If you can really merge together teaching the reader a new language with an entertaining story, that would be a great achievement, and your book could become very popular with educators. But wow, that sounds difficult. I'm a software developer by profession. I can't imagine writing a book that would include all the details of how to program in Java and also be an interesting story.

Now if there are some things about the Japanese language that you think are particularly interesting and that you want to work into a novel, that's a different thing. I don't know anything about Japanese, but I can easily think of many ways that some detail about a language could be made relevant to a story. A story could have an important plot point where a difficulty in translating created misunderstandings. A character might realize something important about his friend from this society or about the culture in general from some characteristic of the language. (I'm suddenly reminded of a TV show I saw years ago where a character talks about the tropical paradise that he plans to retire to, and he says, "The natives there have no word for 'work', but they have a hundred different words for 'cocktail umbrella'.") Some subtlety in grammar could turn out to be an important clue in solving the mystery. (In the Bible, in Matthew 21:31-32, Jesus makes a theological argument based entirely on the tense of a verb used in a scripture quote, that makes sense in English but is more pointed in Hebrew.) Etc.

Would it be possible to write a story where the learning process itself is made interesting? Maybe. I think it would be hard. You could certainly have a scene where a character who has been struggling to learn some difficult subject suddenly gets a burst of understanding, and has a "eureka" moment. Plenty of stories have been written where the struggling student suddenly has a breakthrough and demonstrates that he can now beat the master in a sword fight or chess game or whatever. But could you do that over and over again as he meets each new challenge? I think it would get tedious. I'm not saying it can't be done, and more power to you if you can pull it off.

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