When Learning Feels Boring, Build a Better Way
We enrolled my son, Nicky, in a Sunday Chinese class to help him learn Chinese. We paid for the classes and bought the required Chinese textbooks.
But after attending for a while, Nicky kept telling me, “Chinese class is so boring.”
I actually sat in on one of the classes before we enrolled him, so I understood what he meant. I noticed that when the teacher introduced certain Chinese words, such as the names of famous imperial palaces or historical places in China, a child growing up in the U.S. has no idea what they actually refer to or what to picture in his mind.
Without much explanation, context, or interaction, those words can be difficult to remember. But these Chinese characters are in the texbooks and the teacher hops the kids to memorize them. Today, there is no school and I told him, “If the way you’re learning Chinese is boring, why don’t you think about how to make it fun?”
His first idea was to use Blooket and learn through games. I thought that was not bad, but I encouraged him to go one step further:” instead of just using a game someone else had created, why not build something yourself?”
I suggested that he use my ChatGPT account (he has no ChatGPT account) to build something he wants. So, he toldChatGPT what he wanted to create.
He took a picture of the Chinese characters he was supposed to learn that week, uploaded it to ChatGPT Work, and started giving ChatGPT his own ideas.
ChatGPT first created a matching game where he could flip cards and match Chinese characters with their English meanings to earn points. It was fun, but we quickly realized that this kind of game worked better for reviewing words he had already learned than for learning new characters for the first time. Comic for him, but Nicky immediately said it looked like something for little kids.
He likes the manga series Case Closed, so he kept giving ChatGPT more instructions about what he wanted, the story, the style, the characters, and how he wanted the Chinese vocabulary to be incorporated. After several rounds, he ended up with a series of comic pictures that he actually liked.
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Then I asked him to write down the Chinese characters that appeared in the comics.
He could write them down right away. More importantly, he knew what they meant in English.
That was the part I found most interesting.
The Chinese characters themselves had not changed. What changed was his role in learning them — and, perhaps more importantly, his mindset.
First, he went from passive learning to active learning. Instead of simply being told what to read, write, and memorize, he became involved in deciding how he wanted to learn.
Second, I wanted him to change the way he responded to something he found boring. Instead of thinking, “This is boring, so I don’t want to do it,” I wanted him to think, “This is boring. How can I make it more interesting and more fun to learn?”
To me, that shift in mindset matters even more than learning a few Chinese characters.
Chatgpt didn’t simply make the lesson more entertaining. It gave him a tool to participate in designing his own learning experience.
When children find something boring, instead of only asking them to study harder, maybe we could also encourage them to ask:
“Can I create a better way to learn this?”
