Learning doesn't have to be fun

This idea is as obvious as it is revolutionary today: believing that learning “has to” be fun is hurting your learning goals.

Imagine your pilot announcing, before landing, that they never quite got around to the part of the training that covers… how to land a plane. It was a bit dry, honestly, and they just couldn’t get into it. You’d be horrified. And rightly so.

If fun were a driver for learning, this would be a perfectly reasonable situation. But it is not. Apply that same logic to your own learning, though, and suddenly it sounds acceptable. Many would argue there’s nothing wrong with trying to make learning enjoyable, and they’ll probably bring up some experience they had with apps like Duolingo or “that one great teacher” as proof.

We all see how learning can’t depend on fun once the stakes get high enough: nobody wants a surgeon who skipped the boring parts of medical school. But the moment the consequences feel distant or personal, that instinct disappears. This article is about that gap.

What’s the problem with fun?

So, what’s wrong with trying to make learning fun? Isn’t anything in life better if it’s fun?

Learning can be made fun, and when that’s the case, it’s great. The problem appears when we demand that learning be fun. When “fun” becomes a universal requirement for learning… or else we won’t learn at all.

The reality is that it’s not fun that produces learning. I’ll say that again: fun is not what produces learning. When a learning experience happens to be enjoyable, it makes learning more bearable, but the enjoyment itself isn’t the mechanism that produces learning.

So what is? If you follow Kognitivo, you already know:

What produces learning is overcoming specific kinds of cognitive struggles, often called desirable difficulties, pitched at the right level of difficulty or optimal challenge point. Not every struggle counts (cleaning your desk is a difficulty, but it won’t teach you biology so it’s not desirable). Only the kind that forces your brain to actively engage with the material does.

When you make connections, rephrase ideas or wrestle with what something actually means, you engage in deep processing. That productive effort is what builds lasting memory, since cognitive effort tells your brain the information matters. This is backed by a vast body of empirical research. It’s like going to the gym: you struggle in a specific, targeted way now to strengthen your muscles so that you struggle less later in life.

Remember the ideas or remember the experience?

Research on emotional memory shows that emotion intensifies our ability to remember experiences: we remember parties, birthdays or weddings vividly. But does emotion help us remember ideas? Theories, methodologies, concepts? It’s worth separating the two: emotion strengthens the memory of what exactly?

Some teachers and learning designers intuitively assume that integrating joy into a lesson will automatically improve memory of the educational content. That equation is misleading and the failure mode has a name: it’s what cognitive scientists call the seductive details effect. When interesting-but-irrelevant material gets added to instruction, learners spend their limited cognitive resources processing the fun details instead of the content. Your brain follows what’s interesting and the actual material loses.

One well-known example from the research makes this almost comical: students read a passage about coffee production enriched with an anecdote about how goat herders discovered coffee because their goats did a happy dance after eating the beans. A week later, students remembered the goat story vividly. What they remembered significantly less was the actual content about coffee harvesting they were supposed to learn.

By the way, a week from now, you too will probably remember the dancing goats and little else from this article. That's the seductive details effect happening to you, live. I decided the risk was worth it.

Making learning fun often leads to remembering the fun parts of the experience of learning rather than the ideas you wanted to learn. You remember the fun game you played to learn algebra, but your algebra didn’t improve.

One can't just transfer the joy of memorable personal experiences to conceptual memory of a topic. There’s a whole line of research in cognitive science focusing on the difference between episodic memory and semantic memory. If those two worked the same way, weddings and birthdays would be full of people using the chance to memorize quantum physics, ancient Greek philosophy or C++.

But can’t the struggle be fun?

Of course. When learning is genuinely fun, the enjoyment comes directly from the cognitive friction itself: it’s the kind of satisfaction you get when solving a puzzle or cracking a code. This is why well-designed games work: they are essentially “struggle engines.” Games build artificial obstacles and make overcoming them feel rewarding. When a learning experience does the same, effort and the entertainment become the same thing.

So if productive effort can be fun, why not always make it that way? That’s the key question. There are three reasons:

First, and most importantly: it’s quite difficult for the average learner to tell whether fun is added on top of learning or woven into it. More often than not, the enjoyment comes from something other than the cognitive engagement with the material (a seductive detail) and the struggle gets displaced. This is what happens when you play a video game in a foreign language to learn that language, but the combat is so addictive that you mash through the dialogue just to get back to fighting. Learning just doesn’t happen.

Second, fun is subjective and unstable, which makes it a poor foundation for a strategy. The strongest counterargument is adherence: even if a fun method teaches less per minute, at least it keeps you showing up. But research shows fun doesn't reliably predict commitment. Fun is a spike and spikes fade. Building your learning strategy around fun is like only going to the gym on days you feel like it. It might happen more than you’d expect. But it’s not a plan.

Third, and most insidiously: conditioning yourself to need fun in order to learn is likely to prevent knowledge transfer from happening. Learning tied to a specific emotional condition, like enjoyment, becomes harder to apply in a real-life setting, when the context cues don't include enjoyment. Someone who learned about investing by listening to entertaining finance podcasts will feel informed right up until the moment they have to make an actual financial decision with real money on the line. You have to prepare for the real task and often it’s not fun. Tolerance for productive discomfort is itself a learnable skill that you should aim at mastering. Chasing fun prevents you from building it.

Why we want learning to be fun

This article was actually triggered by a conversation I had. A fellow foreign national I recently met in Tokyo told me how they were at risk of deportation if they didn’t reach a functional level of Japanese within a few months. Their plan, however, was to watch anime and play video games, because “learning has to be fun, otherwise it just won’t work”. We spent a good hour on this because they were pretty convinced. When I referred to cognitive science, they would dismiss it by saying “that just doesn’t work for me”.

My friend in Tokyo isn’t an outlier. Most of us went through education that felt pointless: rote memorization in lessons disconnected from purpose taught by teachers who never explained why the struggle mattered. We learned that effort equals tedium. When we encounter learning as adults, we’re fighting those ghosts. And without the structure of an educational institution (grades, deadlines, peers), reframing learning as “fun” becomes a substitute for the accountability that used to keep us going. Underneath it, there’s desperation for something else to keep us going.

There’s a cultural layer, too. We live in an era of hustle-culture backlash, and rightfully so. People are exhausted. The idea that everything should require grinding effort feels suffocating.

When someone says “learning has to be fun,” they’re often saying “I need something in my life that doesn’t feel like work.” That’s a legitimate cry for balance. But fun is a poor answer to it.

How did we get here?

This belief doesn’t come from nowhere. Two forces have pushed it more than any others. One is the cultural impact of edutainment marketing: apps like Duolingo have shaped our perception of what learning looks like, even though their staff openly admit the app is designed to compete for a slot in your free time.

The other is a well-intended effort by teachers and experts to lower the barriers to complex topics by making them feel like a game. The problem is that experts who give this advice (especially language learning influencers) have already built a high tolerance for productive discomfort. They take it for granted. Their audience probably hasn’t.

So even with the best intentions, telling people that learning should be fun is advice that works for the expert giving it, who’s at ease with difficult topics, and fails the person receiving it, who probably still needs to learn to sit with the discomfort.

What actually works: cut the wrong kind of hard

Let’s be clear: nobody is arguing that learning should be miserable by design or that enjoyment is somehow suspicious. But if you want to optimize how you study, you don’t need to inject superficial fun. Here’s a much better focus: remove unnecessary mental friction, what scientists call extraneous cognitive load (or the non-desirable difficulties), so your brain has energy left to tackle the productive struggle. Here are 5 strategies to achieve precisely that.

The first one is analogies. Using analogies to learn complex topics is a playful strategy, but that’s not the reason why analogies work. They work because they offload new information onto ideas your brain already has.

Consider this example from the article on analogies: “The immune system is like a detective agency”. This analogy hands your working memory an image it doesn’t have to build from scratch: you’re suddenly picturing cells that patrol and collect evidence. But you’re not learning “immunology and an analogy”, you’re learning “immunology through a mental structure that costs you nothing extra to hold onto”. That’s the difference between a seductive detail and a genuine scaffold. The goat story sits next to the content, unconnected; a good analogy sits inside it, load-bearing.

The other four strategies follow the same principle. They’re enjoyable as a side effect of reducing cognitive load, not as the goal itself:

• Use visuals: visuals usually make tedious learning experiences more pleasant. They’re also massive learning boosters, not only for “visual learners” (everyone’s a visual learner). This is called the dual-coding effect.

• Use plain language and short texts: Avoid learning with academic texts and complex jargon. Short sentences and paragraphs are proven to lower the extraneous cognitive load and help you learn. This is also why microlearning works.

• Use storytelling: Weaving your learning experience into a story, if it fits the learning goals and avoids seductive details, boosts learning.

• Make learning inductive: Start with an example or scenario that creates a need to know, then supply the theory. Motivation is earned by curiosity.

These are just five strategies but there are many more: quizzes, flashcards, mind maps, interactive animations, etc. Note that each one of these strategies can also be misused into a seductive detail if it’s not designed properly. The test is always the same: if you removed the “fun” element, would the lesson get harder to understand or just less decorated?

Instead of fun, focus on progress

Cutting unnecessary friction is half the fix. The other half is regulating your emotions towards learning in a constructive way.

Concretely, this means: cultivate a "let's do it!" attitude and an honest belief in your ability to succeed. Nurture a mindset of embracing the challenge instead of disguising it as fun. Research shows that one of the biggest sources of motivation in academic high performers is the feeling of achievement after completing a challenging task. Progress is the only motivator that compounds: the more you achieve, the more you want to achieve. If you’re honest about whether you're improving, you’ll find the only signal your brain will actually trust long-term, because unlike fun, it can't fade or be faked.

This is also the honest answer to my friend in Tokyo and to anyone in their position: not “push through, it’ll be fine,” but “the struggle isn’t the obstacle to your deadline, it’s the only thing that was ever going to get you there.” Fun was never going to satisfy an immigration deadline. Embracing the struggle might.

At the end of the day, when the plane finally lands smoothly at the airport, the pilot isn't celebrating because the flight manual was a blast to read. They're celebrating because they got the job done.

Keep Learning

Prompt suggestions. Always ask follow-up questions:

• I’ve just read an article on “Learning doesn’t have to be fun” and honestly, I still believe learning needs to feel enjoyable to me personally or I just won’t stick with it. But I’m happy to discuss that. I’ll give you my reasons, please reply specifically to them and add sources to back up your replies.

• I want to make my learning more efficient without relying on fun to get me through it. Which strategies can I follow instead? Help me customize those strategies to my specific situation. Ask me what I’m learning and how I currently study first.

• Act as a teacher and test me using retrieval practice on “why learning doesn’t have to be fun.” Ask me 6 questions, one at a time, only continuing when I answer. Make them progressively harder.

Further reading

• 📑 How seductive details do their damage: The original theoretical account of the seductive details effect referenced in this article. If you want to understand why interesting-but-irrelevant content backfires, start here.

• 📑 Measuring actual learning versus feeling of learning: The Harvard study showing students learn more from effortful active classes while believing the opposite happened. A clear illustration of why “what feels like it’s working” is a bad guide for learning design.

• 📑 How (and why) emotion enhances the subjective sense of recollection: A deeper look at how emotion shapes memory, useful if you want to understand exactly what emotional intensity does and doesn’t strengthen.

Related articles

No pain, no brain: the learning science of desirable difficulties

Optimal challenge point: how hard should learning be?

Don't trust your brain: the importance of metacognition