Across
- 1. The ranked list that pits you against strangers and grabs your status anxiety, motivating when it inspires and hollow when the names mean nothing to you.
- 6. Active attention and involvement, the metric apps live or die by, which is not always the same thing as actual learning.
- 8. The slow, quiet enemy of every course and gym membership — people gradually dropping out one by one until the room is empty.
- 10. The whole practice this package is built around — taking something that isn't a game, like learning verbs or doing push-ups, and bolting on points, levels, and streaks so your brain wants to come back tomorrow.
- 12. The opposite of the above — motivation that arrives from outside, in the form of money, grades, badges, or a number on a screen.
- 13. A strong, often irrational urge to do something you can't easily stop, the dark cousin of genuine motivation.
- 15. Smooth, effortless, with nothing slowing you down — wonderful for getting started, occasionally terrible because the resistance was the part that built the muscle.
- 18. The temporary support structure, borrowed from construction sites, that holds a learner up and then quietly disappears as they grow able to stand on their own.
- 20. Skinner's mechanism for strengthening a behavior by what follows it; the same principle that trains a pigeon and powers your daily streak.
Down
- 2. The slow process of taking in and internalizing a skill or language until it becomes part of you, not just memorized.
- 3. The unbroken run of consecutive days an app counts and you protect, sometimes at 11:58 at night for no good reason.
- 4. Devotion or belief based on imagined cause and effect rather than reason, what Huizinga called a hollow ritual that points at nothing higher.
- 5. That demoralizing flat stretch where you keep working but stop improving, named after a high, level piece of ground.
- 7. The keeping of what you learned so it doesn't leak back out of your head, the thing spaced repetition was invented to protect.
- 9. A fancy adjective meaning "relating to play," lifted straight from the title of Huizinga's most famous book; reach for it when "fun" sounds too plain.
- 11. The kind of motivation that comes from inside the activity itself, where you do the thing because the thing is its own reward and no points are involved.
- 14. Being completely surrounded by and soaked in something, the all-day flood of a language that makes living abroad so brutally effective.
- 16. The brain chemical behind that little jolt of satisfaction and craving every time the screen flashes green and rewards you.
- 17. The real destination behind all the points genuine, demonstrable skill, the kind that shows up on certificates and in actual conversations.
- 19. The easier sibling of producing an answer from scratch — merely identifying the right choice among options, which feels like knowing but isn't quite.