Bantari: since you quoted the above, may I assume you also read it?

I have been involved with languages professionally almost all my life. In my circles there is a big difference between bilingual (relatively rare) and fluent (very common). Fluency, commendable as it is, to me is only about language(-processing) skill. Being bilingual is rather about having a similar range of comfort as a native in all normal situations, a large proportion of that (as I implied) being from cultural accretions.

I repeat that I regard the difference as pertinent to the OP, as I'd regard amateur go levels as equivalent to 'fluent' and only upper pro levels as equivalent to "bilingual".

I might add, by the way, that I recognise that the word bilingual is being cheapened in the same way that genius has been cheapened, but I do feel it's useful to try to maintain a distinction. (FWIW, although I don't know you I would accept that you are one of the few here who would be likely to fall into my strict category of bilingual.)

I have spent 28 years of my live in UK and 33 in US (plus one in Iran). I can comfortably understand the idiom of either country. But after all the time I have been in the US there are still phrases everyone here uses which would never occur to me to use, even though I understand them. And I still use British phrases without even thinking about it. People seem to understand me for the most part but once in a while I stump people. I consider myself totally bilingual in American and British English, but according to John's criteria I am not sure I qualify.

When it comes to culture I think I tend to be more British oriented because that is how I was raised. My wife of over 20 years complains about my Britishness sometimes. I still love cricket but have never seen a baseball or basketball game, even on TV. I do think there is a need to distinguish between multilingual and multicultural.

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Still officially AGA 5d but I play so irregularly these days that I am probably only 3d or 4d over the board (but hopefully still 5d in terms of knowledge, theory and the ability to contribute).

If you play go under Japanese rules and I play go under Chinese rules, we are both playing go. If an American speaks English and I speak English we are both speaking English. To talk about being bilingual in two versions of modern English seems daft to me. I have more trouble (but not much) understanding British children's slang than I do understanding American speakers. This seems to be the normal state in Britain/Australia/NZ/South Africa/Singapore/India etc. In my experience it is mostly Americans who pretend there is any practical difference, which may possibly be because they have not been exposed to the wealth of English accents in the Commonwealth the way we have in Britain. But the proof of the pudding is that Americans routinely listen to British actors, read British books, etc - all with essentially perfect understanding (and ditto, if less often for other varieties of English). It's true that Oprah Winfrey put subtitles up when she interviewed Susan Boyle, but plenty of British English speakers find some Scots speaker hard too.

That is not to say Americans and Brits prefer to say some things with different grammar, but that doesn't affect comprehension, and in both countries there are people of one class/generation who will use different grammar and vocabulary from people of another class/generation in the same country. I caught my daughter by surprise the other day when we were on a walk and saw a tiny bird. I told it was a Jenny Wren. She was totally baffled (but knew what a wren was). I was totally baffled that she was baffled, because I felt sure she must have heard that term as a child at least. It's not just me. A little earlier I had been speaking to a doctor who would be in-between us both as regards age, and she said she was Dr Wren. I said, "As in Christopher?" and she hooted with joy: "Yes - everybody else asks me if it's as in Jenny!" I'm sure my daughter and I could compile a very long list of words one of us knows and the other doesn't, words one uses and the other doesn't (fancy words for colours would provide many examples), words or phrases one prefers and the other doesn't, and all sorts of language-based things one knows and the other doesn't (e.g. to do with cooking or sport), but surely no-one, not even the wannabe winder-uppers on this forum, would seriously suggest my daughter and I speak different languages??????????????

Americans and Brits are of course different in a host of cultural ways, one of which may, as I suggest above, be a different response to the various versions of English.

Sounds to me like you are back-peddling. I have a strong respect for most of your opinions, but on this one I must disagree.

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Still officially AGA 5d but I play so irregularly these days that I am probably only 3d or 4d over the board (but hopefully still 5d in terms of knowledge, theory and the ability to contribute).

The gulf between British, US, Canadian and Australian English is really overstated. Maybe if they have a few more centuries, it'll start to get unintelligible, but for now they seem awfully close. There's a handful of unique expressions and some specific vocabulary, but nothing so completely different that you would want to take lessons before traveling to one of those countries.

At least, the gap between British English and French or German seems considerably larger. I certainly wouldn't expect to understand French with only a solid understanding of English. And yet I've spoken with people from lots of different English-speaking countries without much trouble. I don't deny that there are some differences, but they seem little more than cosmetic to me. It's really nowhere near the same kind of barrier as speaking a different language entirely.

Agreed. But the argument put forward was that without the cultural heritage you cannot be considered bilingual. That is what I am disagreeing with.

Although, I must admit that a person from the deep south in US may have trouble communicating with a Geordie. In fact, when I went for an interview at university as 17-year old I met a Geordie who was also interviewing and I thought we has a foreigner. I was from Yorkshire - less than 100 miles away.

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Still officially AGA 5d but I play so irregularly these days that I am probably only 3d or 4d over the board (but hopefully still 5d in terms of knowledge, theory and the ability to contribute).

I have over 50 years very close experience with language professionals: translators, academics, diplomats, foreign correspondents... I think I have met only three who claimed to be bilingual, and one of those (a linguistics lecturer) was deluding himself because he had an accent so thick none us could understand him. Our other lecturers included UN interpreters. They did not claim to be bilingual. Their awe was reserved for a colleague who could interpret simultaneously between two languages while doing a crossword in a third language while in the booth. These people included several who were boastful of their language ability, but they had other ways of expressing it. One I was tickled by was a diplomat who kept repeating, "I speak Arabic, AND I read Arabic and write Arabic." Others would stress that they were PROFESSIONAL translators.

My language colleagues seemed to reserve bilingualism to describe having two native languages from birth. Myself, I relax the criteria a bit, but I still think the number of bilingual people I have met who were not born in that environment amounts to only between one and two dozen. The normal phrase I use to describe even the highest level of language ability acquired after birth is "totally fluent", but as I say I have softened my standards a little.

Just "fluent" is not all that high for me - say 1-dan amateur in go. This may be to do with the generation game. When I started learning languages the emphasis was on grammar ("construe this Latin, boy!") and speaking was almost an optional extra. Even at university courses would emphasise literature, arts, religion - actually speaking was for the proles.

That changed over several decades so that now speaking is emphasised heavily and cultural aspects are relatively neglected. Whether that's good or bad is obviously a matter of opinion, but I do notice that one feature of people who are proud of being "fluent" is that they are rather poor at reading what is written. We see that all the time on this forum. They just seem to "flow" over a text and get merely an impression of what they read, and answer that instead of what was actually written. I also think the lack of deeper understanding of foreign cultures is potentially harmful, although it is masked somewhat by the whole world now becoming more and more uniform, and of course more people do travel and broaden the mind nowadays.

I also remember Margaret Thatcher complaining bitterly, in the early days of dealing with Gorbachev, that there was nobody in Britain's universities who could explain the Soviet economy properly to her. There were plenty of people who spoke Russian fluently and others who knew the economics jargon, but none who had the necessary cultural background to convey what it meant to be a Soviet person having to survive on a daily basis in the USSR.

But hey (to use an Americanism), I can get around the USA without a dictionary or an interpreter. Wow! (another Americanism - does this fluency mean I'm bilingual?) Seriously? (another Americanism - make that multilingual, and I might as well claim to be 9-dan go pro while I'm at it since I could solve the tsumego tami posted today instantly).

From Multilingualism --

I'm probably zerolingual: I speak zero languages fluently.

From NALDIC:
Since we are discussing learning a second language and its relation to go, I think the OP clearly meant sequential bilingualism, not simultaneous. Everything John says is undoubtedly true, but unreasonably changes the goal posts initially set. A pedantic drift, if you will.

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- Brady
Want to see videos of low-dan mistakes and what to learn from them? Brady's Blunders

I think when become very accomplished in a second language you realise how far from being bilingual you are. I too jnow translators and interpreters who wouldn't dream of calling themselves 'bilingual' (although many people use the word on their CVs .

For me (perhaps like John), it's the idea of
"able to use two languages especially with equal fluency e.g. bilingual in English and Japanese" that distinguishes 'bilingual' from 'fluent', 'skillful' or 'natural'.

I've only met a handful people I consider truly bilingual, most had parents of different nationalities, the others changed countries while they were still in the school system.

I recognise that others here are using the word bilingual in a much broader sense...

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Working on losing those 100 first games...one horrible fiasco at a time...

When I was a child, I lived in Kerala, South India, and I spoke English and Malayalam quite fluently, together with my German mother tongue. Since we had contact to British and US-American people, I learnt to imitate their respective accents and intonation (I could even emulate that singular Scotsman tea planter with whom I lived for a week’s vacation), and I remember how I baffled the adults b/c I could switch from British to US to Indian English (retroflexes and all) at will, but of course not in all depth of idioms. I still can speak English so that some people think I’m British, or so that some think I’m American. Of course I know that I lack a LOT to be fluent in any variant of English today.

But … before I thought I grew up trilingually, should I now elevate myself to view that as quinto(?)lingual? I don’t think so.

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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 don't think the differences on English are over stated.... quite the contrary. The whole dialog about a Jenny Wren or Christopher.... both are foreign to me. But that in no way means my proficiency in English is lacking. It means I am unaware of a cultural reference.

And I also do not think with time it will get worse. With the modern ease of communication, like we are doing here, it is getting better if anything. People in America watch BBC television far more frequently. Good drama from the USA is watched world wide. Etc... We are MORE exposed to all the variations now than ever, and we adapt and learn.

So this all started about Go right?

I think the same can be said of Go. As it has spread across the globe, and books have been translated into more and more languages, I think the differences between the 3 main styles has diminished. There are still subtle differences, scoring differences, phrases used, etc... but the Japanese words seem to be dominant in most places now. The Go world as a whole, as they are being exposed to all variations, are settling on a global norm if you will. But like language, the different 'flavors' of Go are actually different dialects of the same root language, and not new languages in and of themselves.

I would consider myself pretty bilingual, even in John's stricter definition. In my country (South Africa) I was obliged to learn two languages (English/Afrikaans). While that is hardly unusual, I think it's true in many European countries too, I was fortunate that I learn to speak both before I was five. I don't recall the exact circumstances, but I gather I started with one language (Afrikaans) until I was about 3 and then switched to the other (English) after that. English remained my preferred language, but even in my final year at school, I was taking the first language Afrikaans classes (i.e. the class taught to those pupils who preferred to use Afrikaans as their first language). While my professional and social life is largely English, I retain sufficient familiarity with the idioms, shortenings and slang and can read, write and converse in Afrikaans, with an appropriate accent.

A definition of fluency I like is "do you dream in that language?"

I like "do you find yourself talking to yourself in that language?"

Some here may remember the old stand-by in war films, where a Gestapo officer is grilling a supposedly bilingual English prisoner who professes to be French. Suddenly he slaps the prisoner across the face and the prisoner exclaims "What the Dickens!" instead of "Merde!"

When I was (long ago) living in Japan, I routintely dreamed in Japanese. I would never have thought of myself as bilingual, though.

(Nowadays I can hardly make sentences and can't read at all. I should probably try and fix that.)

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Confucius in the Analects says "even playing go is better than eating chips in front of tv all day." -- kivi

Spoilers for Inglorious Bastards

In my experience, learning Go is much like, say, learning music or learning a second language. There are a few elements that apply in all situations, but the variety of such situations is endless. Modern style and classical Chinese style, for example, can be considered different "Go languages", but they both have the rules of liberty and capture. These are just applied differently. Not unlike how the same set of sounds and utterances can be present in two languages, but the way in which they are organized and applied is what makes them different.

As for DDK players, everyone goes through the DDK phase. My irritation is with those who think that rank is everything. Rank is just an indicator of where you stand in relation to other Go players, skill-wise. I would not say that the DDK deserves to be where he/she is if only a few months have transpired since his/her first taking up the game. A 10k player will of course know more than a 20k player, a 3k player will know more than a 10k player, and a shodan will know more than a 3k player.

I say that the kyu-dan system is nominal, since these are titles, not averages. In a karate dôjô you get a belt after successfully completing a curriculum of skill sets for X level. Once you get your black belt, you have mastered the basics enough that you can begin to learn them again, but this time with knowledge and experience that you did not have at the beginning. In a Go dôjô, kyu-dan rankings are suitable since they serve as titles indicating level of skill completion and to make this possible, there is a professional faculty to supervise the progress of all students.

For a Go community in which most players are not formally trained, play on a casual basis, and do not possess any exceptionally advanced skills in Go, a win-loss average ranking system, similar to ELO Chess rankings, would be more suitable. This is easier for those who are not so advanced in their Go skill as one need only know win-loss ratios and the margins of victory or loss. I believe this will make pairing of players easier.

For DDK and SDK players the lack of progress can be frustrating. With a good study regimen, anyone can break the ice

Not true. I was never a DDK. I did not get a rank at all until I entered my first tournament, about 10 months after starting to play. Before then I just played three game kadobans against each regular opponent as the club without thinking about rank. I only needed to be assigned one to determine what level I should enter the tournament as. Even after that I did not think about rank until the next tournament because we all returned and continued our kadobans.

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Still officially AGA 5d but I play so irregularly these days that I am probably only 3d or 4d over the board (but hopefully still 5d in terms of knowledge, theory and the ability to contribute).