I 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.
Magic: The Gathering took me from N2 to Japanese fluency
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Re: Magic: The Gathering took me from N2 to Japanese fluency
#42This 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.
Re: Magic: The Gathering took me from N2 to Japanese fluency
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
Small, pithy quotes vs dozens of paragraphs are rather different things.
It does not surprise me in the least that a machine can produce excellent small quotes. Markov chains have been production some fantastic stuff for decades, for example, and they're about as complicated as an abacus. https://thedoomthatcametopuppet.tumblr.com/
Re: Magic: The Gathering took me from N2 to Japanese fluency
#44Cute premise but reads like a LinkedIn post (or maybe just AI).
Suppose you saw the em dash in the first line and drew that conclusion
Re: Magic: The Gathering took me from N2 to Japanese fluency
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
I got 4/5 human. #3 - I chose AI, it was very close.
I noticed something-humans will use words precisely and loosely at the same time. AI will seem like it’s precise but a lot of the wording it uses can be cut or replaced by something else without losing much meaning.
Re: Magic: The Gathering took me from N2 to Japanese fluency
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
A few paragraphs isn't writing, it's a snippet. The shorter something is, the better AI will be at mimicking it, because underlying flaws are less likely to be made apparent.
Music is another great example of this. I enjoy techno/trance type stuff, but YouTube is becoming borderline unusable for this genre due to AI slop. You'd think AI would do a good job of producing tracks here since this genre is certainly somewhat formulaic. And about 2 minutes into a lengthy track I'd probably do relatively mediocrely at determining whether it was human or AI, but by about 10 minutes into a track it's often painfully obvious. I run this experiment regularly as I find myself having to skip the AI slop which YouTube seems obsessed with recommending anyhow.
Ironically AI is probably providing a boon to human DJs here, because actively seeking them out it is one of the only ways to escape YouTube's sloparithm.
Re: Magic: The Gathering took me from N2 to Japanese fluency
#47The 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.
Re: Magic: The Gathering took me from N2 to Japanese fluency
#48> "...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?
Re: Magic: The Gathering took me from N2 to Japanese fluency
#49I 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.
Hell, 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.
Re: Magic: The Gathering took me from N2 to Japanese fluency
#50The 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.
I 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.