Ich hab gehofft, ein Paar Schwestern unter dem Tannenbaum zu finden. Statt bekam ich Bananagrams und einen Fahrradträgerzeug. Am meistens ist Weinachten nicht noch fertig! In meine Zeitzone hat Santa Claus immer noch elf Stunden, mir meinem Geschenk zu geben. (Hehe, Santa hat elf Stunden...)

Maybe I should post this link too: Deutsche Gobegriffe - Mitarbeit erbeten.

Thx I added my suggestion for “moyo”, albeit only in the discussion part, too shy yet to touch the “real thing”.

(For the anglo folks: That’s an SL entry for German Go terms)

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“The only difference between me and a madman is that I’m not mad.” — Salvador Dali ★ Play a slooooow correspondence game with me on OGS?

I understood it as "German Gobe Grips" until I clicked on the link.

Your suggestion "Gerüst," was also the first thing that popped into my mind - but I guess Germans understand "Moyo" just as well or poorly as the rest of us. And that's the thing: for those of us who don't know a CJK Language, we're stuck with second hand terms anyway. For Germans and others who can read and write in English, there's simply more material, people and information available, and whether you say "thick" or "dick" (that's a German word, please don't censor!), you're probably equally off the mark because it ain't 厚い (whatever that means!). In any case, I think it's great that you Germans, as well as other Europeans and CJK speakers all use English to make your thoughts available to a broader western audience. Thanks for making the effort!

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Patience, grasshopper.

It's not just Grips, it's SuperGrips!

Well, the percentage of people living in peace is quite better than three thousand years ago.

I'm not saying having a common language would solve all problems, but I believe it would help. I believe if everyone spoke the same language there would be less war and less pain.

I really believe it would be harder to convince Americans that all brown people in the world are terrorists if they spoke English. That way, "please don't kill our children" wouldn't sound so close to "Infidel! I kill you!".

Also, all of that knowledge that is now accessible to anyone because of the internet wouldn't be nearly as valuable if it wasn't heavily concentrated in two or three languages.

A few unordered thoughts, for and against:

• There's nothing wrong with you doing this as a comment in brackets. You could perhaps even translate this proverb into English ("in German, we have a proverb...") to help more people.
• The GTL is designed to be a repository of reviewed games - that is, I should be able to go to the GTL and look at other people's reviews of other people's games. For that reason, it's convenient to have a common language - otherwise, everyone has to learn all languages.
• Western go servers, Sensei's Library, etc. are pretty much all in English. Standard go terminology is mostly Japanese and English (or poor translations of English). This means that all online go players will have seen English-language terms before, and have a good enough knowledge of English to understand well-written reviews. (Rudimentary English - "good for white", "black dies", and the like - is enough.) On the other hand, I can read German fluently, but don't know any of the go terminology.
• We are not judging you for your written English. We are grateful to you!
• British and American people are bad at learning languages, partly through laziness (we are unbelievably lucky that everything 'international' seems to mean that it's held in our native language), partly due to a poor education system (our teachers can barely speak the languages they're teaching). (I don't like that any more than you do, believe me. I find it shameful.)
• Native English speakers use terms like "funny business" when talking to each other because it's far more down-to-earth than this exotic "aji" nonsense, but they shouldn't use opaque colloquialisms around non-native speakers. If they do, however, don't take it as rudeness - they probably don't realise it's hard to understand. (See my previous point. If you don't learn a foreign language, you have no concept of what it's like to know - or not to know - one.)
• I don't think discussions of world peace are useful.

In theory, if you learned another language you would have less strife in your life, since you would be able to speak and understand others, but your conclusion is that others must speak English, which leads us to conclude that you are the cause of War.

Admin: Personal attacks are not allowed in this forum.

SL is mostly (99.7%) written in English but perfectly open to other languages (see: http://senseis.xmp.net/?topic=1280). It probably wouldn't be sustainable to go completely multilingual (having every major page in several languages, multilingual interface). If someone would produce some hundred pages in another language within the current framework we would in my opinion go for a friendly fork for practical reasons.

KGS is completely multilingual, that the EGR is the default room is the only remnant of KGS being "in English".

I have no problems at all with native English speakers, I don't feel judged, treated badly or whatever, quite the contrary. It is just that there are different problems - if you want to spread Go to elderly people or kids you can't rely on a foreign language. If you don't develop terminology, literature etc. in your language, you can't teach them. Obviously, other people are doing this already, it just seems that people like me - internet addicted go players who learned in English - tend to rely on English way too much to be of much help in spreading Go locally.

P.S. People hoping for an international language and world peace by language should consider learning Esperanto. It is somewhat like Go, five minutes to get started, but a lifetime to master.

My point wasn't that we shouldn't be open to other languages. Just that, if you want to learn go or teach go, your most efficient options are to learn an Asian language or learn English.


Right now, the EGR has about 10 games open and about 120 active; the 日本の碁会所 has 5 open and about 30 active; the Salle Française has 1 open and 9 active; the Deutsche Ecke has 0 open and 4 active. These are, in my experience, the four biggest national rooms on KGS (by number of users). (The current number of games may be a time zone issue biased in America's favour, but I don't think you'll find any time when the numbers aren't similar. I've noticed the Deutsche Ecke go up to 20-30 games before, but rarely more.) KGS is multilingual in the same way SL is; it's open to other languages, but in practice, most stuff is done in English.


I agree completely. That doesn't seem to be what you were talking about in your first post, though!


And no sense of satisfaction a few months in when you realise you still can't talk to anyone in it.

I didn't realize what motivated Tapir early on, but it's entirely consistent. The point is that there's back and forth between high level discussion of the game and having a comfortable vocabulary for introducing the game to beginners, kids, elderly players, and so on. Maybe you don't directly use the same concepts, principles, and what have you, but having spent time discussing those high level concepts in your native language will help you be more effective in communicating later on. Terms like "funny business" crop up in fairly high level discussions of terminology, after all.

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Occupy Babel!

It is interesting that the first western dan player was from Austria:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manfred_Wimmer

Sure. Well, at least in the case of teaching children and so on, I entirely agree with tapir. It's always going to be easier to communicate fuzzy, hand-wavey, intangible concepts like 'influence' and 'thickness' via imprecise language, and that is always best done with a language the student is very comfortable with.

To non-beginner adults with a rudimentary knowledge of English, though, I disagree. I speak from admittedly non-go-related experience: it's uncomfortable to have to read jargon in a language you're not familiar with, but sentence patterns and words crop up over and over again, and you get used to it very quickly provided it's not written in too florid a way. It might as well be a simple code, or your own language with a bunch of new words. Your native language is obviously hugely preferable, but it's not actually significantly more efficient, and I think the benefits of having a common language outweigh the drawbacks.

(Ultimately, after about 10 kyu, most communication can be done silently with stones and a board, pointing, and facial expressions. It is never ideal, but it's always good enough.)

It's also worth pointing out that you, tapir, seem to be envisioning some sort of substitution between time spent preparing English language material on SL and time spent preparing identical German language material for Bavarian octogenarians and Saxon second-graders. In fact, these are quite different projects. SL is a great tool for somewhat intelligent introverts with an autodidactic streak and an obsession with glowing screens. It will never be a platform for early-childhood education, in any language.

Often what we enjoy doing is not what needs to be done most urgently, but there is no shame in that. It would be sad if you stopped working on go projects because the SL articles which call to you seem less important than a preschool intervention which leaves you cold. Personally, I feel compelled to offer really long reviews to anyone who asks. This is undoubtedly the least efficient way of spreading go-knowledge. Nonetheless, I'd like to think its something, and I know that when I offer fewer reviews I don't make up for it by volunteering at elementary schools.

(as for world peace - I was mostly joking. But some people seem to be suggesting that there's something vaguely menacing or discomforting about the role of English in the go community, despite the fact that international communities - with all that they've accomplished, for good or I'll - have always settled on one language or another. It's also worth remembering that a lot of funding for the go community has come from people who see go as a route to international comity and understanding.)

I speak four languages and have never lived in an English speaking country.

Please explain to me how exactly am I the cause of war for suggesting that if everyone spoke the same language the world would be a better place.