Life In 19x19

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!"

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

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.)

John Fairbairn wrote:

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!"

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

tekesta wrote:As for DDK players, everyone goes through the DDK phase. My irritation is with those who think that rank is everything.

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.

About Afrikaans, I just can't help but love a language which contains words like "hijsbakkie". It's a disrespectful and completely accurate description of what an elevator does. It's beautiful pragmatism.

"hoisting box" is so much easier to understand than "elevator", which only makes sense to people who know Latin.

Um, "to elevate" is a more common verb in English than "to hoist" is. Actually, "hoisting box" is rather ambiguous in meaning to me.

Don't you like the image of two guys pulling a rope to get the box up? Elevator seems so impersonal to me.

tentano wrote:Don't you like the image of two guys pulling a rope to get the box up? Elevator seems so impersonal to me.

You know we use "lift" too (I'd never say elevator)? Finding the word for an inanimate object impersonal is strange to me.

tentano wrote:Don't you like the image of two guys pulling a rope to get the box up? Elevator seems so impersonal to me.

That is why its real name in English is a Lift.

DrStraw wrote:

tentano wrote:Don't you like the image of two guys pulling a rope to get the box up? Elevator seems so impersonal to me.

That is why its real name in English is a Lift.

Will we take the lift to the flat?

Boidhre wrote:

DrStraw wrote:

tentano wrote:Don't you like the image of two guys pulling a rope to get the box up? Elevator seems so impersonal to me.

That is why its real name in English is a Lift.

Will we take the lift to the flat?

Things like that are why I say I am bilingual.

I think we've reached the point of faffing about for a laugh, here.

tentano wrote:About Afrikaans, I just can't help but love a language which contains words like "hijsbakkie". It's a disrespectful and completely accurate description of what an elevator does. It's beautiful pragmatism.

"hoisting box" is so much easier to understand than "elevator", which only makes sense to people who know Latin.

Afrikaans (usually but somewhat controversially described as a creole form of Dutch) does not normally use the "ij" form of that sounds, so it's just "hysbak". Also, the "kie" ending is a diminutive form, possibly also used to indicate affection, casualness or as an affectation. A bit hard to think of an example where an elevator would be used in a casual or affectionate way: "I just popped into the ol' elevator on my way to the vault" seems like an unlikely sentence, ever.

Personally, I don't find strict classifications of "bilingual", "fluent", etc., to be all that useful. In go, you can get a rank based on game results, so it is easy to classify. It's harder to do with language level. Maybe you can use language test results, or count vocabulary words you know, but it's hard to classify well, in my opinion.

Kind of like trying to say somebody is "1d at being funny" - how do you measure that? It's all quite subjective, and the answers you get will depend on who you ask.

Nonetheless, from this thread, it would see, to me that there is at least a correlation between interest in discussing go, and interest in discussing language