Magic: The Gathering took me from N2 to Japanese fluency

I 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.

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"

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

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.

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

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.

I 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.

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.

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!

Side effect: All your cards look cool.

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.

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