alt Hacker NewsContraversial 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.
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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.
> 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.
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.
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