Textbooks Don't Deserve to Be Let Go

No, apps and AI aren't always better

I hated looking at textbooks when I was in school. Like most people, I found them boring. Who cares about agriculture reforms under Napoleon III or logarithms anyway?

I failed to see the positive hidden between the lines.

Order. Ease of mind. Direction.

In reality, we hated textbooks not for what they taught us but for what they stood for: directives from the teacher. Many of my friends still hold that hatred and disgust for textbooks without realizing how useful they can be if used well.

More importantly even, if you’re choosing to use a textbook today, it’s likely for a topic you chose to learn about.¹

The opposite of textbooks is messy

Learning a foreign language is a huge endeavor. It takes at least a few months to feel any real “success” such as understanding bits of sentences or having short conversations. And it takes years to reach a high level of fluency.

I sometimes meet new people who look at me in awe when they see me switch back and forth between French/English and Japanese. I understand it can be impressive since I react the same way when I see someone switching to a language I don’t understand with ease. But we’re missing the story behind these languages. I began learning Japanese in 2008. I lived in Japan from 2015 to late 2020. I’ve spent thousands of hours speaking, listening, reading, and even writing Japanese. Being able to switch shouldn’t be surprising. It should be expected.

What I mean is that learning a language takes time. There’s a lot to learn.

Figuring out what to learn now, what would be useful after, etc. is a difficult task when you’ve never learned a language before.

Sure, some websites may give you the 1000 most common words—here’s my (negative) opinion of these lists if you’re interested—or the grammar patterns you “need”—here’s my (positive) opinion on this with what I find useful, although that’ll differ slightly by language.

You can find what to learn next but it’s an effort. An effort textbooks allow you to drop.

I’ve been using Assimil to learn German nowadays and it’s giving me peace of mind knowing I’ve got about 3 months of lessons building on top of each other with some repetition and insisting on the patterns/words/expressions that matter.

If I wanted to learn from a beginner stage without a textbook, I’d have to go pick some information here and some over there, and I might still be missing some important words or grammar patterns.

Learning useless stuff is good

I remember looking back at an old Japanese textbook, wondering why I forced myself to learn this or that word. Well I didn’t. Or at least I didn’t back then.

When you choose to follow your own path—learning specific words, specific patterns, specific expressions,—it also means everything you come across is useful.

Everything is important. Which means nothing truly is.

I started using a textbook for Chinese this week and the words 角色 (role, part in a movie) and 阅览室 (reading room) came up. I don’t care for them. Absolutely, don’t need them right now so I don’t mind not remembering them. But the words 预订 (to book, to reserve) and 风格 (style, manner) which appeared in the same lessons are ones I want to remember.

Textbooks teach a lot of things. Some being useless is not a waste of time. It’s a confirmation you don’t have to remember everything.² It lowers the pressure to learn.

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We look down on textbooks too often despite how great they are. Most textbooks are good, even the bad ones. What matters isn’t the textbook itself, it’s what you do with it.

Follow a textbook without thinking, trying to learn everything and you’ll drive yourself crazy.

Instead, use it as a driver for direction and use other resources to keep the fun alive.

These days, I’m watching a new German show on Netflix called Cassandra. I’m also having fun listening to this Chinese audio drama in the background—only understanding bits here and there—and watching some old The Voice of China-like TV shows.

Cheers for reading!
Mathias

1. Or at the very least that’s what I’ll be talking about now 😁

2. It also means it can cater to more people. What doesn’t interest you can be useful for someone else.