4 ms·

Slight tangent, but the barrier of entry to play Go is quite high. I've been learning over the past few months and it's very frustrating. My biggest complaint

by umvi 6y ago

Slight tangent, but the barrier of entry to play Go is quite high. I've been learning over the past few months and it's very frustrating. My biggest complaint is that the jargon is just out of control. For whatever reason, instead of localizing go jargon like the chess community has done, the Go community just uses native japanese terms for everything. This makes it super confusing as a beginner and you basically have to have the wiki[0] open all the time if you have any hope of understanding what people are saying. For example, when reading a beginner's article: "In this case you can't move here because of ko, so you would instead look for other pieces that are atari or close to atari - just be careful of seki" Would a bit of localization killed the go community? "In this case you can't move here because of the repetition rule, so you would instead look for other groups of pieces that can be captured or are close to being captured - just be careful not to get in a capture-stalemate scenario" My second biggest complaint is that scoring is not straightforward at all and there are 2 rule sets (Chinese, Japanese). Which ruleset should I use? Are there any subtle strategy changes you need to make when switching between rulesets? When playing I have no idea who is currently winning if it looks close (i.e. roughly equal white/black areas) and I basically just wait for the computer to announce the winner at the end. Anyway, just venting about my frustrations learning Go. Chess, by comparison, was much easier to learn. I didn't feel swamped with jargon and it was much easier for me to grasp which side was winning (though occasionally good chess players can pull a checkmate out of a seeming disadvantaged situation that I didn't see coming!) [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Go_terms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Go_terms

lacker 6y ago
The English-speaking Go community is just many times smaller than the English-speaking chess community. Many of the best books for Go are translated versions of foreign ones, there aren’t many popular streamers to learn from, all sort of educational material is not there because the market isn’t there.
comboy 6y ago
Biggest community is in Asia. When you visit tournaments common language for what's happening on the board is really nice to have. If you stick around that's like <0.01% of what you need to learn anyway. Plus you've learned where Atari name came from :) Japanese counting is more popular but you really don't need to worry about it until some high dan level if you play on 19x19. It takes a long, long time before you will be able to say confidently who is winning on 19x19 if the game is close. I suck at Chess, but to me Go was much easier to learn. You can have quite a lot of fun without studying any openings.
pouta 6y ago
I can help you. My handle on OGS is the same as here.
dragontamer 6y ago
> For whatever reason, instead of localizing go jargon like the chess community has done, the Go community just uses native japanese terms for everything. Uhhh... give this Japanese page a looksie: https://docs.oracle.com/javase/jp/8/docs/api/index.html https://docs.oracle.com/javase/jp/8/docs/api/index.html I think we got the better trade. Just my opinion though. Games which are more popular in the far-east will naturally use far-east terminology. Similarly, things Americans do will get American-terms associated with them (IE: Programming Java). Its the nature of international trade. Even a Japanese-centric language, like Ruby, is largely composed of English terms to continue to appeal to the greater programming community. (Japanese programmers would learn "for" and "while" loops anyway, despite it being foreign terms). Semaphores are "P" and "V" canonically meaning something in Dutch. Someone tried to explain it to me once, but you pretty much have to learn Dutch for the meaning of it all. ------------ Anyway, its the nature of working internationally. Gotta learn tidbits of the other people's language to really understand something.
- elsjaako 6y ago
  > Semaphores are "P" and "V" canonically meaning something in Dutch. "P" stands for "Prolaag", which is a word Dijkstra made up. Both Raise (Verhoog) and lower (Verlaag) start with a V in dutch. So knowing dutch doesn't really help with that one.
cpeterso 6y ago
Go is both abstract and very popular. Are there games that remix/reskin Go with a theme and rules that make learning the game more approachable?
- dragontamer 6y ago
  9x9 boards are the "learning board". Its much easier to learn the basics of Go on the small board.
mlyle 6y ago
> instead of localizing go jargon like the chess community has done, Yah, we never say Zugzwang or J'adoube or Desperado or En Passant or Fianchetto or Zwischenzug. There's not so many foreign words to learn to understand Go compared to chess. For lots of the fundamental Go words, they'd need a new English word coined anyway or an imperfect metaphor.
- dmurray 6y ago
  > For lots of the fundamental Go words, they'd need a new English word coined anyway or an imperfect metaphor. This. Even the chess words that are anglicised have special meanings in chess. Being a native speaker of English doesn't help you understand what a "Bishop" is or what is "Checkmate" (OK, that's an anglicised Persian word) or the difference between a "Pin" and a "Skewer". Also, most of the Japanese terms don't have a meaning outside Go, so it's not like Japanese people get a leg up there.
pmontra 6y ago
Think about Japanese rules as a shortcut to the real rules, the Chinese ones. Counting with Japanese rules (at the end and during the game) is much simpler. However Chinese rules allow for a straightforward resolution of all the border cases, starting with the bent four in the corner. Just keep playing under normal rules. About localization, I started playing in a go club and the people I played with told me the Japanese names and their meaning. I already knew all the words when I started reading books. I understand that if you started reading books and watching videos from day one, that's a problem. And about learning Go, the very first months are a very dense fog. Somebody never emerge from the fog.
- naniwaduni 6y ago
  At a high level, all counting schemes are basically streamlined approximations of stone counting. It turns out that codifying all the edge cases is nontrivial and so the simplified scoring schemes come up with subtly "wrong" results at the margin, but this is something of an acceptable sacrifice that doesn't (isn't supposed to) change the essential nature of the game. The main difference that Japanese rules make on scoring is, essentially, codifying a matter of etiquette directly into the scoring: they aggressively penalize extending the game with unnecessary moves, which to be sure has some distortionary effects, but again, they don't essentially change what people considered the meat of the game; you'd play 90% the same game regardless of counting method, with differences cropping up basically once a player starts passing. This has far more ... pedagogical value outside the game, than the impact it has on the game itself. By far the most important rules in a ruleset, in terms of how they affect core gameplay, are the repetition rules, and even the choice of suicide rule has a more substantial impact than the differences between scoring systems.
throwaway08320 6y ago
I'd rather say "pizza, noodles or sushi" than "leavened dough, dry unleavened dough, rolled up rice with fillings"
jasonwatkinspdx 6y ago
You're getting downvoted but I think this is a fair criticism. There was a recent boom of chess on twitch.tv, and I think a big part of why it took off is that the various GMs and commentators consciously simplified the terminology without sacrificing accuracy in what they were saying. It's not a binary thing either. English Go commentators could simply adopt a dual vocabulary approach where they say things like "watch out for seki or dual life." They do this already on "beginners streams" for some of the bigger events.
dragon96 6y ago
> My biggest complaint is that the jargon is just out of control. I don't see how this is true unless you are memorizing the wiki like a dictionary. I can only think of 9 words that I use commonly in games (sente, gote, seki, ko, atari, hane, aji, tenuki, komi). Sure, I think the English Go community could try (and probably has tried) to reinvent translations for each of these, but they probably wouldn't catch on. "Seki" is easier to say than "mutual life", "sente" is more precise and easier to say than "initiative", "ko" is just ko. I just don't feel like learning new words is any more difficult than keeping track of algebraic notation in chess, and I think it's just part of the commentating culture of both games. > Which ruleset should I use? As a beginner, you shouldn't worry about which one you use. They're almost the same except on some edge cases.
technofiend 6y ago
I picked up some of the terms watching Hikaru No Go a japanese anime about a middle school kid who learns to play Go with the help of a ghost. Good clean fun. It's on Crunchyroll and probably other platforms.
- bioipbiop 6y ago
  I’m so sick of these interloping Japanese ghosts taking American Go coaching jobs.

by umvi 6y ago

lacker 6y ago

The English-speaking Go community is just many times smaller than the English-speaking chess community. Many of the best books for Go are translated versions of foreign ones, there aren’t many popular streamers to learn from, all sort of educational material is not there because the market isn’t there.

comboy 6y ago

Biggest community is in Asia. When you visit tournaments common language for what's happening on the board is really nice to have. If you stick around that's like <0.01% of what you need to learn anyway. Plus you've learned where Atari name came from :) Japanese counting is more popular but you really don't need to worry about it until some high dan level if you play on 19x19. It takes a long, long time before you will be able to say confidently who is winning on 19x19 if the game is close. I suck at Chess, but to me Go was much easier to learn. You can have quite a lot of fun without studying any openings.

pouta 6y ago

I can help you. My handle on OGS is the same as here.

dragontamer 6y ago

> For whatever reason, instead of localizing go jargon like the chess community has done, the Go community just uses native japanese terms for everything. Uhhh... give this Japanese page a looksie: https://docs.oracle.com/javase/jp/8/docs/api/index.html https://docs.oracle.com/javase/jp/8/docs/api/index.html I think we got the better trade. Just my opinion though. Games which are more popular in the far-east will naturally use far-east terminology. Similarly, things Americans do will get American-terms associated with them (IE: Programming Java). Its the nature of international trade. Even a Japanese-centric language, like Ruby, is largely composed of English terms to continue to appeal to the greater programming community. (Japanese programmers would learn "for" and "while" loops anyway, despite it being foreign terms). Semaphores are "P" and "V" canonically meaning something in Dutch. Someone tried to explain it to me once, but you pretty much have to learn Dutch for the meaning of it all. ------------ Anyway, its the nature of working internationally. Gotta learn tidbits of the other people's language to really understand something.

elsjaako 6y ago
> Semaphores are "P" and "V" canonically meaning something in Dutch. "P" stands for "Prolaag", which is a word Dijkstra made up. Both Raise (Verhoog) and lower (Verlaag) start with a V in dutch. So knowing dutch doesn't really help with that one.

cpeterso 6y ago

Go is both abstract and very popular. Are there games that remix/reskin Go with a theme and rules that make learning the game more approachable?

dragontamer 6y ago
9x9 boards are the "learning board". Its much easier to learn the basics of Go on the small board.

mlyle 6y ago

> instead of localizing go jargon like the chess community has done, Yah, we never say Zugzwang or J'adoube or Desperado or En Passant or Fianchetto or Zwischenzug. There's not so many foreign words to learn to understand Go compared to chess. For lots of the fundamental Go words, they'd need a new English word coined anyway or an imperfect metaphor.

dmurray 6y ago
> For lots of the fundamental Go words, they'd need a new English word coined anyway or an imperfect metaphor. This. Even the chess words that are anglicised have special meanings in chess. Being a native speaker of English doesn't help you understand what a "Bishop" is or what is "Checkmate" (OK, that's an anglicised Persian word) or the difference between a "Pin" and a "Skewer". Also, most of the Japanese terms don't have a meaning outside Go, so it's not like Japanese people get a leg up there.

pmontra 6y ago

Think about Japanese rules as a shortcut to the real rules, the Chinese ones. Counting with Japanese rules (at the end and during the game) is much simpler. However Chinese rules allow for a straightforward resolution of all the border cases, starting with the bent four in the corner. Just keep playing under normal rules. About localization, I started playing in a go club and the people I played with told me the Japanese names and their meaning. I already knew all the words when I started reading books. I understand that if you started reading books and watching videos from day one, that's a problem. And about learning Go, the very first months are a very dense fog. Somebody never emerge from the fog.

naniwaduni 6y ago
At a high level, all counting schemes are basically streamlined approximations of stone counting. It turns out that codifying all the edge cases is nontrivial and so the simplified scoring schemes come up with subtly "wrong" results at the margin, but this is something of an acceptable sacrifice that doesn't (isn't supposed to) change the essential nature of the game. The main difference that Japanese rules make on scoring is, essentially, codifying a matter of etiquette directly into the scoring: they aggressively penalize extending the game with unnecessary moves, which to be sure has some distortionary effects, but again, they don't essentially change what people considered the meat of the game; you'd play 90% the same game regardless of counting method, with differences cropping up basically once a player starts passing. This has far more ... pedagogical value outside the game, than the impact it has on the game itself. By far the most important rules in a ruleset, in terms of how they affect core gameplay, are the repetition rules, and even the choice of suicide rule has a more substantial impact than the differences between scoring systems.

throwaway08320 6y ago

I'd rather say "pizza, noodles or sushi" than "leavened dough, dry unleavened dough, rolled up rice with fillings"

jasonwatkinspdx 6y ago

You're getting downvoted but I think this is a fair criticism. There was a recent boom of chess on twitch.tv, and I think a big part of why it took off is that the various GMs and commentators consciously simplified the terminology without sacrificing accuracy in what they were saying. It's not a binary thing either. English Go commentators could simply adopt a dual vocabulary approach where they say things like "watch out for seki or dual life." They do this already on "beginners streams" for some of the bigger events.

dragon96 6y ago

> My biggest complaint is that the jargon is just out of control. I don't see how this is true unless you are memorizing the wiki like a dictionary. I can only think of 9 words that I use commonly in games (sente, gote, seki, ko, atari, hane, aji, tenuki, komi). Sure, I think the English Go community could try (and probably has tried) to reinvent translations for each of these, but they probably wouldn't catch on. "Seki" is easier to say than "mutual life", "sente" is more precise and easier to say than "initiative", "ko" is just ko. I just don't feel like learning new words is any more difficult than keeping track of algebraic notation in chess, and I think it's just part of the commentating culture of both games. > Which ruleset should I use? As a beginner, you shouldn't worry about which one you use. They're almost the same except on some edge cases.

technofiend 6y ago

I picked up some of the terms watching Hikaru No Go a japanese anime about a middle school kid who learns to play Go with the help of a ghost. Good clean fun. It's on Crunchyroll and probably other platforms.

bioipbiop 6y ago
I’m so sick of these interloping Japanese ghosts taking American Go coaching jobs.