The general principle here is that engaging with your hobbies and interests in the second language is a good way to increase exposure (and also more fun).
For me, it was translating lyrics and interviews of Japanese musicians.
While any form of learning engagement will benefit your language proficiency, I think song lyrics should be considered carefully. Just like poetry, they play on words and meaning, and oftentimes express something in a way that no other native speaker would have done just for the sake of rhythm or metafores. On the other hand, if you are at almost native level, getting and research these kind of ambigouity probably helps crossing that tiny narrow gap to native even further.
I second this, personally I'm currently using French version of Khan Academy to upgrade my French (you just do something like fr.khanacademy.org). The French also have a lot of theoretic math resources available and it's what I vibe with at the moment. Whatever gets you to read, listen, learn.
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.
Nice. Back when I lived in Taiwan, several of my students regularly played Magic: The Gathering (魔法風雲會). I’d been playing since 4th edition so I was already very familiar with it. Combined with the fact that I was studying traditional Chinese at the time, it turned out to be quite helpful.
Incidental language exposure through gaming is an awesome way to learn.
Certainly AI editorialised. I wonder if this is because English isn’t their first language, and they are confidence compensating. I’ve worked with a lot of folks also from Philippines and the Tagalog/English mix leads to some confidence challenges sometimes.
I really think that the HN guidelines need updating, so that we're directed to consider those comments the same way we do accusations of astroturfing:
> 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.
Contraversial opinion perhaps, I don't think the cards or the game itself took him to fluency.
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.
Also N2, even N1, is generally not remotely fluent. Plenty of Chinese can pass N1 and still failed to have a conversation.
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
When it comes to the practical results it doesn't matter. Japan is a society that values rubber stamps over actual competency/performance. If you can present an N1 certificate to an employer you're more likely to be hired than someone who's fluent without it (assuming they aren't Japanese)
My Japanese isn’t good enough (I feel like I could pass N3 if I wanted to, but I do not find exams fun, and it won’t benefit my career, so I don’t) to comment on how the MtG rules text reads in Japanese, but I can say that English MtG rules text is so grammatically constrained that I’d say it barely qualifies as English at all, so I could easily imagine someone who could read MtG English rules text perfectly but be totally unable to even hold a simple conversation in English.
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.
Fluent means different things to different people (and in different languages!).
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.
I agree. Magic-ese is a language on its own. It's close to English, but not quite. What is an "intervening if clause" in English, for example? Learning the rules of Magic will leave you confused about a natural language if you didn't know any better.
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.
There's a serious advantage to becoming fluent by moving to a country that speaks that language fluently. Try becoming fluent in Japanese in Nigeria for "Japanese hard mode"
This is a really cool idea, I am living in a non English speaking country but work all day online with English speaking colleagues so I need something like this. I really like the idea of getting cards only in the local language. That may be a bit expensive for constructed but it could work really well for drafts. When drafting a new set I used to spend hours learning all the new cards beforehand so it's not really different.
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?
Almost every word written in katakana is a loanword, and most of them come from English. There are many different words in Japanese that can be translated to "damage"/"harm"/"injury" etc., but I guess none of them carry the exact connotations that ダメージ does. I've noticed that loan words are very common in Japanese video games, sometimes for words that to me appear to have an exact match in Japanese. I don't know why they do this. There are also some writers that make an effort to avoid loan words and use more traditional Japanese, but this is not so common.
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.
dameeji is a loanword, no? I have no ability in japanese but from a quick search 損傷 Sonshō (injury), which includes 傷 Kizu (scratch, wound, scar, weak point, hurt) seems like the words for "Damage" in a transliteration sense.
Can't imagine using MTG to learn a language. But it does seem intuitive in hindsight. Back when I played in the junior super series and nationals I could recall almost every card and what it did. So I can see how that leap would be tantermount. Kudos.
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.
This account could be an interesting case study for the comprehensible input hypothesis of language acquisition. Narrowing the language domain and pre-studying vocabulary may have helped the effectiveness of the study:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Input_hypothesis
The Japanese learning community has wholesale adopted the Krashen school of thought, tons of us learn almost exclusively by comprehensible input, myself included. I spent about 50 or so hours on grammar at the start, a list of 1,500 words and the rest has been purely reading and watching what I want and playing video games. At about 1000 hours total since last June I'm able to read a lot of everyday Japanese without much difficulty. I plan on taking N2 at the end of the year.
I have always felt lucky to have learned C and Magic: The Gathering at the same time (1994). I am not sure if the C helped my MTG playing more or vice versa.
I find it more likely that the author got more fluent from his job, friends, and other every day things you run into by living in Japan. Spending every day reading, writing, talking to, and listening to one's coworkers and then after work also talking more with those coworkers or friends would be much more time than a single magic event per week.
The general principle here is that engaging with your hobbies and interests in the second language is a good way to increase exposure (and also more fun).
For me, it was translating lyrics and interviews of Japanese musicians.
While any form of learning engagement will benefit your language proficiency, I think song lyrics should be considered carefully. Just like poetry, they play on words and meaning, and oftentimes express something in a way that no other native speaker would have done just for the sake of rhythm or metafores. On the other hand, if you are at almost native level, getting and research these kind of ambigouity probably helps crossing that tiny narrow gap to native even further.
I second this, personally I'm currently using French version of Khan Academy to upgrade my French (you just do something like fr.khanacademy.org). The French also have a lot of theoretic math resources available and it's what I vibe with at the moment. Whatever gets you to read, listen, learn.
I have a similar story.
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.
Hell, I grew up with English as my first language and I still learned a lot of obscure vocabulary from magic!
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.
I recommend you search "Premodern MTG" and "Oldschool 93/94 MTG" ;)
Nice. Back when I lived in Taiwan, several of my students regularly played Magic: The Gathering (魔法風雲會). I’d been playing since 4th edition so I was already very familiar with it. Combined with the fact that I was studying traditional Chinese at the time, it turned out to be quite helpful.
Incidental language exposure through gaming is an awesome way to learn.
Cute premise but reads like a LinkedIn post (or maybe just AI).
For sure an AI write up
Certainly AI editorialised. I wonder if this is because English isn’t their first language, and they are confidence compensating. I’ve worked with a lot of folks also from Philippines and the Tagalog/English mix leads to some confidence challenges sometimes.
10 replies →
You couldnt tell the difference between a LinkedIn writer and a up and AI, they are both comparably generic.
1 reply →
Suppose you saw the em dash in the first line and drew that conclusion
No. But I admit I stopped after these:
> 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
1 reply →
I love this new future where every post has comments about whether AI was involved or not!
I really think that the HN guidelines need updating, so that we're directed to consider those comments the same way we do accusations of astroturfing:
> 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.
2 replies →
That's just in the short term. After a few years people will be complaining this posts sounds like it was written by meat.
2 replies →
Contraversial opinion perhaps, I don't think the cards or the game itself took him to fluency.
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.
Also N2, even N1, is generally not remotely fluent. Plenty of Chinese can pass N1 and still failed to have a conversation.
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
When it comes to the practical results it doesn't matter. Japan is a society that values rubber stamps over actual competency/performance. If you can present an N1 certificate to an employer you're more likely to be hired than someone who's fluent without it (assuming they aren't Japanese)
Source: live and work in Japan
My Japanese isn’t good enough (I feel like I could pass N3 if I wanted to, but I do not find exams fun, and it won’t benefit my career, so I don’t) to comment on how the MtG rules text reads in Japanese, but I can say that English MtG rules text is so grammatically constrained that I’d say it barely qualifies as English at all, so I could easily imagine someone who could read MtG English rules text perfectly but be totally unable to even hold a simple conversation in English.
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.
> CEFR B2 which is fluent
That certainly is controversial. I don't think many people would consider anyone who is fluent to only be B2.
Fluent means different things to different people (and in different languages!).
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
Yes I know it's an odd claim.
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.
I agree. Magic-ese is a language on its own. It's close to English, but not quite. What is an "intervening if clause" in English, for example? Learning the rules of Magic will leave you confused about a natural language if you didn't know any better.
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.
There's a serious advantage to becoming fluent by moving to a country that speaks that language fluently. Try becoming fluent in Japanese in Nigeria for "Japanese hard mode"
This is a really cool idea, I am living in a non English speaking country but work all day online with English speaking colleagues so I need something like this. I really like the idea of getting cards only in the local language. That may be a bit expensive for constructed but it could work really well for drafts. When drafting a new set I used to spend hours learning all the new cards beforehand so it's not really different.
> "...and “Damage” (ダメージ, dameeji) until..."
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?
Almost every word written in katakana is a loanword, and most of them come from English. There are many different words in Japanese that can be translated to "damage"/"harm"/"injury" etc., but I guess none of them carry the exact connotations that ダメージ does. I've noticed that loan words are very common in Japanese video games, sometimes for words that to me appear to have an exact match in Japanese. I don't know why they do this. There are also some writers that make an effort to avoid loan words and use more traditional Japanese, but this is not so common.
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.
dameeji is a loanword, no? I have no ability in japanese but from a quick search 損傷 Sonshō (injury), which includes 傷 Kizu (scratch, wound, scar, weak point, hurt) seems like the words for "Damage" in a transliteration sense.
I'm just surprised there is no native (non-loanword) word for "damage" in japanese
2 replies →
Can't imagine using MTG to learn a language. But it does seem intuitive in hindsight. Back when I played in the junior super series and nationals I could recall almost every card and what it did. So I can see how that leap would be tantermount. Kudos.
> Can't imagine using MTG to learn a 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.
Yup, super important point. None of the JLPT exams test output, only comprehension. It’s a really interesting gap!
tantamount
MTG skills don't translate to spelling. Thanks
This account could be an interesting case study for the comprehensible input hypothesis of language acquisition. Narrowing the language domain and pre-studying vocabulary may have helped the effectiveness of the study: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Input_hypothesis
The Japanese learning community has wholesale adopted the Krashen school of thought, tons of us learn almost exclusively by comprehensible input, myself included. I spent about 50 or so hours on grammar at the start, a list of 1,500 words and the rest has been purely reading and watching what I want and playing video games. At about 1000 hours total since last June I'm able to read a lot of everyday Japanese without much difficulty. I plan on taking N2 at the end of the year.
I have always felt lucky to have learned C and Magic: The Gathering at the same time (1994). I am not sure if the C helped my MTG playing more or vice versa.
That's really neat! It's interesting the ways play interacts with how we learn about the world. Sometimes the best learning is the most fun!
It's no secret that being social will help you become in fluent in any language you are studying.
Too many people just want to learn online/without social contact, and never get beyond an intermediate level.
Side effect: All your cards look cool.
My Japanese morphling was the peak of my magic career. It did feel kind of bad when playing a random 12 year old that didn’t know what it did.
I find it more likely that the author got more fluent from his job, friends, and other every day things you run into by living in Japan. Spending every day reading, writing, talking to, and listening to one's coworkers and then after work also talking more with those coworkers or friends would be much more time than a single magic event per week.
Now new zero-evidence zero-consulation rules are going to take me from Japanese fluency to N2.
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