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.
barrenko 2 hours ago [-]
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.
hnfong 7 hours ago [-]
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.
jdmoreira 47 minutes ago [-]
I recommend you search "Premodern MTG" and "Oldschool 93/94 MTG" ;)
zavec 2 hours ago [-]
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.
vunderba 3 days ago [-]
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.
ngruhn 12 hours ago [-]
Cute premise but reads like a LinkedIn post (or maybe just AI).
sureMan6 12 hours ago [-]
For sure an AI write up
simonjgreen 11 hours ago [-]
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.
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.
Groxx 3 hours ago [-]
Small, pithy quotes vs dozens of paragraphs are rather different things.
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/
piperswe 6 hours ago [-]
Spoilers:
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.
somenameforme 3 hours ago [-]
A few paragraphs isn't writing, it's a snippet. The shorter something is, the better AI will be at mimicking it, because underlying flaws are less likely to be made apparent.
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.
PinkMilkshake 7 hours ago [-]
I preferred the AI 4 out of 5 times. That's a little confronting. And judging by the amount of cope in the comments section, others found it the same. I guess it is a small test, but I think it successfully makes it's point.
deafpolygon 3 hours ago [-]
I got 4/5 human. #3 - I chose AI, it was very close.
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.
sdrothrock 5 hours ago [-]
Two human editors. I'm one of them and I absolutely do not use AI tools when I edit.
If you're going off the use of emdashes and endashes, I've been using them for over 25 years.
seanmcdirmid 8 hours ago [-]
You couldnt tell the difference between a LinkedIn writer and a up and AI, they are both comparably generic.
TonyStr 29 minutes ago [-]
At this point, I assume most LinkedIn users use AI to assist in generating posts anyway, so the distinction kinda becomes pointless. Nobody likes reading AI generated posts, and nobody ever really liked reading LinkedIn posts either.
kwar13 3 hours ago [-]
Suppose you saw the em dash in the first line and drew that conclusion
ngruhn 1 hours ago [-]
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
TonyStr 30 minutes ago [-]
I read the whole thing, but I was questioning whether this was heavily AI-assisted or just very linkedin-coded. For me the biggest AI indicators were "From “arcane” to professional", "The results: From the playmat to the professional world" and your "actually owning a language" example. I can't imagine anyone writing those sentences, even long-time linkedin users.
nefarious_ends 11 hours ago [-]
I love this new future where every post has comments about whether AI was involved or not!
mh- 6 hours ago [-]
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.
satiric 5 hours ago [-]
Except "usually mistaken" doesn't apply here, since it's often true.
mh- 5 hours ago [-]
The position of "Degrades discussion" in that sentence implies that the accuracy of the claim has no bearing on that particular impact.
IncreasePosts 10 hours ago [-]
That's just in the short term. After a few years people will be complaining this posts sounds like it was written by meat.
LadyCailin 9 hours ago [-]
You mean the meat communicates?
forbiddenvoid 7 hours ago [-]
The meat is alive, actually. Sentient meat, if you can believe it.
rustyhancock 12 hours ago [-]
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.
socalgal2 10 hours ago [-]
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
waterTanuki 10 hours ago [-]
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
YurgenJurgensen 11 hours ago [-]
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.
Jabbles 12 hours ago [-]
> 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.
ashdnazg 11 hours ago [-]
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
rustyhancock 12 hours ago [-]
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.
dfxm12 11 hours ago [-]
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.
zeafoamrun 4 hours ago [-]
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.
aninteger 8 hours ago [-]
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"
voidUpdate 2 hours ago [-]
> "...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?
TonyStr 35 minutes ago [-]
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.
morjom 2 hours ago [-]
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.
voidUpdate 1 hours ago [-]
I'm just surprised there is no native (non-loanword) word for "damage" in japanese
TheDong 44 minutes ago [-]
There are a ton of words where the loan-word is commonly used even when there's a native word.
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".
voidUpdate 39 minutes ago [-]
I'm happy to accept it, I just didn't expect it. Like I say, I don't know foreign languages enough to speak them or know their culture, I find them interesting from a linguistic point of view. (also its a "soft drink" and a "woodlouse" :P )
seeken 4 hours ago [-]
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.
psidebot 8 hours ago [-]
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
nadermx 12 hours ago [-]
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.
darren_ 12 hours ago [-]
> 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.
simonjgreen 11 hours ago [-]
Yup, super important point. None of the JLPT exams test output, only comprehension. It’s a really interesting gap!
ufocia 12 hours ago [-]
tantamount
nadermx 12 hours ago [-]
MTG skills don't translate to spelling. Thanks
impatient_bacon 9 hours ago [-]
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!
invalidSyntax 9 hours ago [-]
Side effect: All your cards look cool.
brianwawok 9 hours ago [-]
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.
jazz9k 9 hours ago [-]
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.
charcircuit 6 hours ago [-]
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.
totetsu 6 hours ago [-]
Now new zero-evidence zero-consulation rules are going to take me from Japanese fluency to N2.
tripleee 12 hours ago [-]
[dead]
Rendered at 09:04:52 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
For me, it was translating lyrics and interviews of Japanese musicians.
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.
Incidental language exposure through gaming is an awesome way to learn.
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.
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/
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.
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 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.
If you're going off the use of emdashes and endashes, I've been using them for over 25 years.
> 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
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
Too many people just want to learn online/without social contact, and never get beyond an intermediate level.