Magic: The Gathering took me from N2 to Japanese fluency

ppwim 3 days ago 27 commentsRead Article on tokyodev.com

ES version is available. Content is displayed in original English for accuracy.

⚡ Community Insights

Discussion Sentiment

79% Positive

Analyzed from 952 words in the discussion.

Discussion (27 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

aninteger•11 minutes 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"

psidebot•17 minutes 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

ngruhn•about 4 hours ago

Cute premise but reads like a LinkedIn post (or maybe just AI).

sureMan6•about 4 hours ago

For sure an AI write up

simonjgreen•about 4 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.

thierrydamiba•5 minutes ago

Recommend everyone take this test: 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.

nefarious_ends•about 3 hours ago

I love this new future where every post has comments about whether AI was involved or not!

IncreasePosts•about 2 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•43 minutes ago

You mean the meat communicates?

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.

rustyhancock•about 4 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•about 3 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•about 2 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•about 3 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•about 4 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.

rustyhancock•about 4 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.

ashdnazg•about 3 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

dfxm12•about 3 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.

impatient_bacon•about 1 hour 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!

nadermx•about 5 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_•about 4 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•about 4 hours ago

Yup, super important point. None of the JLPT exams test output, only comprehension. It’s a really interesting gap!

ufocia•about 4 hours ago

tantamount

nadermx•about 4 hours ago

MTG skills don't translate to spelling. Thanks

invalidSyntax•about 1 hour ago

Side effect: All your cards look cool.

brianwawok•about 1 hour 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•about 1 hour 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.