All very basic words and kanji that I’d expect any elementary student to learn, and definitely in Genki. But even so, you could also do that with pretty much zero Japanese, but you’d be missing the explanations, and anything that is not a simple life or death puzzle.
I don’t believe Genki is going to help you read a Go book, since I’ve shown some Go books to Japanese people and they’re not even sure what they’re looking at in terms of the text.
This sounds like the equivalent of you saying 上手ですね、日本人より日本人 because you said こんにちは because that’s what Japanese people do. Unless you’re showing them some Edo period Go book, it is not indecipherable gibberish to to even a mildly educated adult. Sure, maybe they don’t know what 一間バサミ is, but that’s no different than terminology in any other sport. Though even はさみ could be understood by its normal meaning.
There’s a lot kanji that are being used in Go specific ways like 打つ for placing stones rather than hitting something, so it helps to have someone explain little things like that, and the variations you might come across from book to book.
I looked at the dictionary, and 打つ has 9 definitions in it, so yea, in the very beginning you only know to “hit”, but it doesn’t take more than a few seconds to learn that it has other meanings. Though the Go definition is more understandable than 芝居を打つ if all you know is the “to hit” meaning. However, Japanese does have specific verbs for a number of things, like how Shogi is 指す, though ironically it also uses 打つ.
I mean if you want to read some nuance into the sentences like whether Black collapses or is ruined or loses some stones etc then sure why not, but if all you care about is that black made a mistake or lost, you don’t need to learn about describing your family for that. (Though 子 is also used to descibe both groups and stones in Go)
I would say if you don’t care about what it says, you need zero Japanese as the pictures will give you enough info. But if you do, 90% of the words used in the book are going to be “regular” Japanese. Sure, you may not need to know some family words, but for instance, a book I have right here on one page talks about 犬の顔、馬の顔、猫の顔 and キリンの顔. All pretty basic words. The words you learn in the beginning are going to be the most common words anyway.
Of course, this only applies to books, videos on Go would still be gibberish.
I think there’s a lot of instances where studying a language is enhanced by doing something you enjoy while learning it
I agree, but that’s why I think it’s better to just learn properly and find some 囲碁辞典 or something like that, because most of the Go terminology you’d need to learn are simply nouns that are not hard to learn.
