Some New Year’s resolutions seem like a good idea, but aren’t, and deciding to learn something simply for the sake of using up some time is probably a counter-productive one. I have already written about this grumpiness of mine, but it has numerous wrinkles that need ironing out.
Learning for the sake of learning may be proffered by your college professors as a wholesome activity, but it is clearly a waste of time and energy. Perhaps, those worthies suggest, it primes you to be able to learn new material, but that too is nonsense. It only primes you how to learn stuff you have no need for knowing, in other words how to fill your inner self, mind and habits with useless junk. That kind of study tends to make a person into a gibberish-spouting bore, whom everyone avoids at public gatherings except other bores. Bores may have a fine time together, boring one another, so if your goal is to bore other bores there is no need to continue reading this.
The goal of learning is to be able to accomplish something worthwhile, something other people value, and especially for them to value it enough to pay you money to acquire it. I’ve known people who have studied a foreign language for years, and are still beginners. It will be rare for someone to pay for language skills acquired from reading textbooks. If someone has a need to know a language so they could converse, they would be far ahead by going to the country where the language is spoken, and totally immersing themselves in it for a month or two. Talking, listening, writing, reading constantly to native speakers, especially about what they are trying to accomplish, will generate real skill with the living ideas latent in that other culture. If you’re forced into book learning, at least watch TV, read books and newspapers in the language, and cultivate a friend who is a native speaker.
The goal of any study is learning how to do something worthwhile. What is worthwhile to you can vary from one extreme of human experience to any other, and perhaps beyond, but when you have a quest for the learning, aimed at an accomplishment, the details of learning background knowledge become exciting and meaningful. Your quest to learn a language and other standard information is only a bridge to understanding current and presently meaningful ideas.
Language acquisition is only an example of a specific thing that someone might choose for a New Year’s resolution, but a better one would be to grow a garden. The reason that is more humanly meaningful is that a garden is an external accomplishment. It is something that other people can enjoy and value; you and they can eat the fruits and vegetables of your efforts. Therefore, it is the direction of one’s personal choice of a resolution that should be the resolution, and such a resolution would be, for example:
To help other people to find their personal goals and do what is necessary to move toward them.