Language Learning as Applied Trivia

I didn’t choose trivia. From a young age, trivia chose me. 

Who was president in 1843? What battle ended World War I? What’s the capital of Azerbaijan? 

Memorizing these mental morsels brought me joy. I learned names and dates with the uncommon enthusiasm of childhood obsession. I knew every US president in order at eight, every country’s capital by twelve. No ulterior motives – I wasn’t thinking about college applications back then – just an instinctive love for knowing about wars, countries, presidents. 

High school brought a new frontier: the quizbowl team. Think high school Jeopardy with skinny teenagers. After final bell, we pored over stacks of past questions and “Ya Gotta Know” lists, honing our skills while getting to know lots of girls (and by girls I mean Nobel-Prize winning authors). We won local tournaments and made noise on “It’s Academic”, a long-running trivia TV show in DC. 

My trivial pursuit stopped at college. As a new chapter began, I started to see my old hobby in a startling new light: was it all a big waste of time?

Learning and recalling each new fact brought a visceral pleasure, a satisfying action loop that, once completed, left me craving more. But to what end? What purpose was served by knowing Chekhov titles or impressionist paintings? Had I been hooked on an onanistic knowledge loop with no greater meaning? 

These musings stayed with me, as did the craving for learning. Thankfully, in my second year of college, I found a new outlet in an unlikely place: language learning. 

After an uninspired high school Spanish career, I stumbled my way into Chinese 101 on a whim. The first year was tough. But after a summer in Shanghai at nineteen, I was hooked. Each new word I learned fired the same trivia loop in my brain, satisfied the same well-worn mental grooves. Chinese vocab was trivia. But it was trivia I could use. I racked up two months of conversations with patient strangers. Learning new Mandarin words unlocked a world of people to meet and topics to explore.

In the near-decade since, I’ve continued to study Chinese well beyond the classroom. I have dozens of tutors and hundreds of YouTube clips to prove it. Learning Chinese is applied trivia, scratching the itch while building real compounding value. I have grand plans for where Chinese will take me, but each new word brings me joy in the present.

I didn’t choose trivia, trivia chose me. But I’m thankful each day for Chinese. Learning this language transformed my love of scattered facts into knowledge of language that bursts out of me, begging to be used.