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Magic: The Gathering took me from N2 to Japanese fluency
- vunderba 5mo agoNice. 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.
- nadermx 5mo agoCan'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.
- ufocia 5mo agotantamount
- nadermx 5mo agoMTG skills don't translate to spelling. Thanks
- darren_ 5mo 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 5mo agoYup, super important point. None of the JLPT exams test output, only comprehension. It’s a really interesting gap!
- GuB-42 5mo agoIt is more like: I love MTG, how to learn a language through this hobby? 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.
- tripleee 5mo ago[dead]
- rustyhancock 5mo agoContraversial 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.
- Jabbles 5mo 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.
- rustyhancock 5mo agoYes 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.
- ashdnazg 5mo agoFluent 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
- ngruhn 5mo agoCute premise but reads like a LinkedIn post (or maybe just AI).
- sureMan6 5mo agoFor sure an AI write up
- simonjgreen 5mo agoCertainly 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.
- thierrydamiba 5mo agoRecommend everyone take this test: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/03/09/business/ai-writing-quiz.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/03/09/business/ai-w... 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.
- PinkMilkshake 5mo agoI 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.
- piperswe 5mo agoSpoilers: 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.
- impatient_bacon 5mo agoThat'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 5mo agoSide effect: All your cards look cool.
- brianwawok 5mo agoMy 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 5mo agoIt'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.
- psidebot 5mo agoThis 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Input_hypothesis
- posh_somme 5mo agoThe 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.
- aninteger 5mo agoThere'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"
- hnfong 5mo agoI 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.
- zavec 5mo agoHell, 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.
- jdmoreira 5mo agoI recommend you search "Premodern MTG" and "Oldschool 93/94 MTG" ;)
- charcircuit 5mo agoI 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 5mo agoNow new zero-evidence zero-consulation rules are going to take me from Japanese fluency to N2.
- seeken 5mo agoI 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.
- zeafoamrun 5mo agoThis 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.
- autumnstwilight 5mo agoThe 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 5mo agoI 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.
- littlecranky67 5mo agoWhile 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.
- voidUpdate 5mo 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?
- morjom 5mo agodameeji 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 5mo agoI'm just surprised there is no native (non-loanword) word for "damage" in japanese
- TheDong 5mo agoThere 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".
- InsideOutSanta 5mo agoMonkey Island taught me English. I can't tell you how confusing insult sword fighting was initially. I had to create long tables with the correct answers because I didn't get most of the puns, and then I had to start from scratch when I had to fight Carla. Anyway, thanks, Ron Gilbert.
- DanielHB 5mo agoA pirate I was meant to be, trim the sail and roam the sea 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...
- cannonpr 5mo agoWanting to play Leisure suit Larry and space text adventure games properly was when I finally “cracked” English, after that I become rapidly fluent. However I feel like it didn’t do my sense of humour any favours.
- dirteater_ 5mo agoThis is awesome. I'm doing something very similar with Chinese and Yu-Gi-Oh right now. So many language courses seem to cater to certain topics like interviewing for a job, getting through college, traveling, home life. But I want to engage and connect with people who share similar interests. Not to mention trading card games are pretty complex themselves and using them as a learning tool forces you to think in the language.
- Shalomboy 5mo agoWhich deck are you running right now in the Chinese metagame? Are there any archetypes that are laborious to write/pronounce/read in Mandarin?
- dsign 5mo agoI wonder if something similar/equivalent--a multiplayer game--could be used to become fluent in a musical instrument and music...
- Ylpertnodi 5mo ago'ROCK BAND" spawned an awful lot of guitarists (that can play a zillion notes per measure). There's probably something similar for drum,mers, but no. bdy cares ab out them.
- Jigsy 5mo agoAside from watching anime, reading manga and listening to Japanese radio (which was to help me get acclimated to people talking fast), I try to play games in Japanese. That's always a great way to learn new words.