Magic: The Gathering took me from N2 to Japanese fluency(tokyodev.com) |
Magic: The Gathering took me from N2 to Japanese fluency(tokyodev.com) |
Growing up in a place that's mostly not English speaking, I owe a large part of my English vocabulary to Magic the Gathering. Many of the cards use somewhat obscure words to impart a fantasy theme, and I learned them naturally when playing.
Cool game.
I kind of tried to return to it after like a 2 decade hiatus, but the game these days doesn't feel like the one I played back then.
It's definitely not so good these days, but a format called premodern is getting more popular. You may find it worth looking in to that one.
For me, it was translating lyrics and interviews of Japanese musicians.
Anyway, thanks, Ron Gilbert.
Monkey Island 3 taught me a good deal of english too. I was lucky to get a text-translated version with english voiceover.
We all would avoid scurvy if we eat an orange...
Incidental language exposure through gaming is an awesome way to learn.
> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.
It "degrades discussion" in exactly the same fashion.
> actually “owning” a language
> I found my answer in the one thing I had loved for over a decade
> Following is a detailed, step-by-step breakdown of how I did just that
Probably the social contact.
I mean N2 (JLPT levels run from N5 competent beginner to N1). Is really quite advanced.
Being N2 is far further than many will ever make it into learning Japanese. To arrive at N2 is very impressive. I think typically N3 is minimum for work on Japan (outside of lower end jobs or things like TEFL).
But JLPT is heavy on theory and light on practice.
It makes sense to me that someone with very little practice but pretty advanced grammar, vocabulary (including Kanji and spelling). Would rapidly pick up fluency if they got a reason to speak.
Not to discount the MtG effect but N2 is approximately CEFR B2 which is fluent. It's just that N2 doesn't assess fluency meaning you can get there with near zero confidence in conversational Japanese.
Not to mention trading card games are pretty complex themselves and using them as a learning tool forces you to think in the language.
Note that he's starting from N2 Japanese, which is already a high level of Japanese proficiency (although it does not test writing/speaking at all, so it's very feasible to have N2 yet be terrible at conversation). He's not exactly learning hiragana from M:TG.
The M:TG competitions are giving him a framework to practice that conversation, which believe it or not can be hard to come by in Tokyo without deliberate effort (see 'expat bubble'). The vocab/grammar on the cards is mostly incidental to all that. If he was playing online M:TG in Japanese he wouldn't be getting anywhere near the payoff.
As far as games go, tabletop RPGs are probably better than MTG because they are all about talking. But nothing beats doing what you enjoy doing, and if what you enjoy is MTG, then MTG is the best.
I only have a basic knowledge of Japanese, more from a linguistics standpoint than a language learning standpoint, but it's interesting to me that "dameeji" is written with katakana and sounds like a loanword, instead of sounding more distinct from the English, which I'd expect from a word that has existed for a long time in Japan. Is this because it's more like a game-specific technical word, rather than just the word "damage"? Or am I just very uninformed about Japanese?
An example which I find amusing is お金ゲット！(okane getto, money get). There are perfectly valid Japanese alternatives to Getto, and to an English speaker, this sentence doesn't even make sense. That's not how "Get" is used in English grammar at all. But in Japanese it's kind of a playful way of saying you acquired something.
Too many people just want to learn online/without social contact, and never get beyond an intermediate level.
That's always a great way to learn new words.
Further, it's easy to pass N2 and/or N1 and still not be able to read most novels or listen to most movies when they get to things like legal proceedings, military strategy, science. All things that people can easily do when actually fluent
Source: live and work in Japan
And if anything, Japanese isn’t even worse for this. Natural Japanese is a highly contextual language, and so I would expect card rules text to stray even further from natural language due to requirements for total unambiguity.
However, gaining the linguistic mastery to explain such complex rules systems, let alone practice small talk with the person across from you allows you master a real language.
That certainly is controversial. I don't think many people would consider anyone who is fluent to only be B2.
As I understand it, B2 means one has a solid, functional proficiency in the language. They conversate/listen/read/write in diverse situations, without needing to switch to a different language or to prepare in advance.
They're very likely, however, to make mistakes, say things in non-idiomatic ways etc. although this is expected to be minor enough to not affect the ability to understand them.
In order to get to C1 and above, one needs a deeper understanding of the language - phrases, idioms, connotations, registers, etc. and a broader set of situations they can handle, e.g., a philosophical discussion. An of course, errors are expected to be rarer.
So, literally speaking, B2 is rather fluent, since the language is "flowing" out of them and they're not stopping to think every other word (which is, as far as I understand, a common interpretation of flüssig in German).
But as "fluent" speakers should know, words come with expectations beyond the literal meaning :P
But I as far as I recall B2 is when you start seeing native people failing the exam without preparation with C2 becoming a legitimate challenge for native speakers.
I believe the same threshold exists in N2 but because it's so Kanji focused without much assessment of fluency.
For example, there's both "desuku" for desk, and also "tsukue" (the original japanese word). They're both in very common use. The loan-word has an ever-so-slight vibe of a western-style desk, while tsukue has an ever-so-slight vibe of a schoolroom desk.
Languages change over time, and english has had a large influence on Japanese.
Of course there's a word for damage in japanese ("higai" is probably the best fit for Magic), but there's also "dameeji" now, and it feels mildly more western-fantasy like to use it.
There isn't always a logical or obvious reason why a loan-word is used over a native word, as is true for a lot of linguistic changes (like in english, why does someone say "soda" vs "pop", why do some people call it a "pillbug" and some a "rolly-polly"?). Just accept that loan-words are used in some cases, and there's not always a reason other than "people just say it that way".
You might be surprised…or you might not. I’ve found it’s a good barometer for whether you actually don’t like AI writing or you just don’t like bad AI writing.
2. Picked the human 5 out of 5. Since it's pointless to take as a judge of preference due to 1), I took it as a test of "spot the AI", and clearly it was obvious to me in every instance.
3. Of course we just "don't like bad AI writing". "Good AI writing" would be unnoticeable. This is incredibly rare in the domain we're talking about.
It does not surprise me in the least that a machine can produce excellent small quotes. Markov chains have been production some fantastic stuff for decades, for example, and they're about as complicated as an abacus. https://thedoomthatcametopuppet.tumblr.com/
On one side, I think this suffers a lot from selection bias: short AI snippets specifically chosen by humans for their quality and they do not necessarily reflect the average experience of AI text. On the other hand, AI generated text does not preclude human editing.
Question 1 had such different styles. I preferred the style the AI was using, but that was purely a stylistic preference.
Question 3 was a toss-up. They both felt fine, and funny enough they both had a "not just X, it's Y" pattern.
Those were the only two where I clicked the AI version - for the other three, it was obvious which was AI.
I noticed something-humans will use words precisely and loosely at the same time. AI will seem like it’s precise but a lot of the wording it uses can be cut or replaced by something else without losing much meaning.
Music is another great example of this. I enjoy techno/trance type stuff, but YouTube is becoming borderline unusable for this genre due to AI slop. You'd think AI would do a good job of producing tracks here since this genre is certainly somewhat formulaic. And about 2 minutes into a lengthy track I'd probably do relatively mediocrely at determining whether it was human or AI, but by about 10 minutes into a track it's often painfully obvious. I run this experiment regularly as I find myself having to skip the AI slop which YouTube seems obsessed with recommending anyhow.
Ironically AI is probably providing a boon to human DJs here, because actively seeking them out it is one of the only ways to escape YouTube's sloparithm.
I successfully chose the least democratically awful slop if that's an indication of anything.
If you're going off the use of emdashes and endashes, I've been using them for over 25 years.