I firmly disagree with this. Because what you create is a gateway.
You see, getting into 19x19 go is, to many beginners, a huge investment. It’s why we ease them into it via smaller boards and capture go. They feel like they need to know everything to even start, and that’s not always helped by us getting scared to drop them into a game when they don’t know nets and ladders because they’ll almost inevitably lose if they don’t (and probably even if they do)
So if you have a 9x9 capture go app (which does exist, but without online functions), they learn how capture works, and they ease into that aspect of the game, then, if they find out about GoQuest, they can ease into how territory works and how it’s similar to a peaceful capture go game, with ever so slight but important distinctions. Then maybe they try out 13x13 on GoQuest, and realize they have a craving for larger board play and look elsewhere to sate it. Odds are, at that point they’ll find 19x19 and maybe eventually try that.
But having a thriving community at that bottom level is, in my opinion, essential for finding those people that might want to venture a little bit further, but not invest the time of learning a full game of Go before that
You can keep thinking that I don’t actually disagree if that pleases you, but with every word you add I understand that our disagreement is on a much more fundamental level.
No, it’s not done. GoQuest is mainly aimed at non-beginners, I think. It contains no tutorial, no explanation of the rules, no interactive atari problems that beginners could do in addition to playing games, and if you try to recapture a ko you get an error message that looks like there was a bug in the application.
But GoQuest has shown that there are definitely a vast number of people who enjoy quick-go-on-a-smartphone.
Nigiri is squeezing the rice into a ball shape. Same as in “onigiri”, as opposed to e.g. rolling it (maki). It also has nothing to do with “two fingers”, literally or otherwise. And sushi is just the type of food.
The issue with translating “hane” as “bend” is that it can easily get mixed up with “turn”, which is also sometimes called a “bend”.
yeah, that’s my biggest holdback on it,
but for a beginner… maybe we could use bend to refer to either one? and introduce hanes specifically as the cuttable bends, reinforcing the “hane invites the cut” proverb
On second thought maybe “doing away” is just too drastic (and unrealistic since it is a long standing cultural custom). But offering English alternatives is certainly a good idea. It would make go more approachable for beginners and outsiders worldwide.
You mean it will make go more approachable for beginners in English-speaking countries.
I’ve taught go while in holiday in foreign countries whose language I barely spoke.
By “barely spoke” I mean I knew how to ask where the train station or restaurant was, and how to ask for a coffee or a sandwich.
I’d look up how to say “eat”, “stone”, “white”, “black”, “breath”, and that’s all the vocabulary that I needed to teach the rules. I was glad to have words like “atari” that I didn’t need to translate.
Also, using words from your language is only helpful if these words are meaningful. For instance, you can say “knight’s jump” instead of “keima” and it’s indeed easier to understand for an English-speaker.
But if you’re just replacing existing Japanese technical linguo with made-up English linguo, then you’re just adding to the confusion. For instance, “ko” is a specific situation, so it has a specific word. If a beginner encounters that word, they’ll think “OK, ko is a go-specific word whose meaning I don’t know yet”. If you replace this word with “loop” as has been suggested above, and then a beginner encounters that word, not only will they not know what you mean with “loop” in this context, but they’ll have the added difficulty to have to figure out that you don’t actually mean “loop”, you mean something go-specific that happens to share the same word with “loop” but is not a loop.
When teaching Dutch beginners, I (and most other Dutch teachers I think) use only a few Japanese terms (go, atari, ko, seki), but I try to use Dutch for everything else.
Stronger players use more Japanese terms when talking about go with other stronger players (such as hane, kosumi, ikken-tobi, keima, dame, jigo, dango, nigiri, tesuji, tsumego, joseki, aji, aji-keshi, honte, fuseki, yose), but for a weaker audience they would usually translate those terms to Dutch. We tend to use Dutch words instead of sente and gote (similar to the common German translation for those terms).
As far as I know we only use one English go term (peep). And of course we also use the Dutch version of “pass”, but that term is not specific to go, as it is used in many other games as well.
More than 500000 people (about 1% of the population) have a judo license in France, most of them children who have no difficulty learning Japanese terms like o-soto-gari.
I can understand the logic, as English tends to be the lingua franca (sic) and we can count on English to find any kind of information and it could make sense to have available English terms for a game.
It would be very confusing trying to watch/read a Go game and/or tutorial in another language, though, without the common code of a few widely accepted terms in a language other than English. I’m sure there are excellent materials in French, Spanish, German and other widely-spread languages and not only in English.
Or does anyone suggest I should stick to English versions?
I mean, advertise to the audience you want to attract, I focus a lot on English speakers because I want to attract the predominant demographic of where I am in the US which either still mostly hasn’t heard of the game, or saw it in something like Knives Out and has no clue how it works
I remember learning the Dutch translation first (large exterior leg throw IIRC) as a kid. But for belt exams we usually needed to know the Japanese terms.
This approach makes sense in such circumstances (trying to attract English speakers) but at the same time it may be raising inconspicuous, unintentional barriers to making the content useful to other populations.
Now apply the same “translate for local population” language idea in 10 different countries and then try to organize a tournament and get them to communicate
What I’ve been trying to say is that learning 100 words that are not in our own language can’t really do any harm, but making useful content local-exclusive may do, even just a tiny bit.
I’m okay with using commonly used Japanese terms like go, atari, ko and seki, because they are universally used in the West and hard to translate.
I actually have more issues with go jargon in Western languages that seem poorly chosen to me.
For example, in go “dead” is somehow less fatal than being “captured/taken as prisoner”, but in the real world it’s the other way around.
Also, the term “liberty” seems very poorly chosen to me. Who the *^%$ came up with that, and why did it catch on? I prefer to use some metaphor related to “breathing room”.
And “eyes” is also strange jargon. With novices, I start out by calling those “chambers”, which fits better into the metaphor of “castles and courtyards” that I use to explain eyes/eye-space/territory.
The distinction between dead and captured is important when explaining why one generally shouldn’t capture dead stones. The inversion you point out is, I think, caused by the fact that the stones are removed immediately when captured (like prisoners), but are left on the field of battle when dead. Even the terminology of the scoring phase reinforces this: after the battle, we remove the dead from the battlefield.
ofc, if you follow the logic of needing universalized jargon, then you run into which terms should be universalized. Chinese and Korean also have jargon that makes it a bit hard to communicate Go terms to with our primarily Japanese borrowings in English
Granted, I don’t intend to get rid of loanword jargon entirely. I’ve said before in this thread that I do find it efficient when you’re familiar with it than translating each time. I just think beginner content benefits from having more connections from which learners can build from, often utilizing their original languages
Meanwhile if you hold that tournament of 10 non-English speaking countries using the predominant loanwords from Japanese that are preferred by the English speaking Go community, not only are you making it harder for them to approach the game, making the tournament smaller, but one can argue that it is an almost colonialist endeavour to enforce the standards of speaking we have found convenient to us over things that would make more sense to those 10 individual languages
