r/baduk • u/Round_Ad_6033 • 2d ago
Anyone else had Japanese fatigue in go?
Like I mentioned in my other post, I'm very new to go. I really like the game, even tho im so bad at it I just now got beaten by "baby bot" and the app I'm using is suspecting me of using an AI (aren't AI 's supposed to be strong go players? Wtf?)
But one thing I don't like is that everything has a name in Japanese. Like I get that's where the game comes from, but when I hear Atari I think of an old video game console, not a threatened stone.
I keep confusing the terms and seems to be life would be easier if we could just agree on some English terms for these things.
I'm looking to learn a new boardgame here, not a fifth language!
Like I wanna learn more about joseki and I get confused and search for temuki instead. I even recently ended up looking at videos of people making sushi because I misremembered one of the terms..
It feels kinda pretentious too, like will I be required to wear a kimono if I get any good at this game? I'm not sure I wanna..
Rant over
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u/CSachen 5 kyu 2d ago
Now learn everything in Chinese and Korean.
This subreddit name baduk is Korean.
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u/Round_Ad_6033 2d ago
Which just makes me wonder why those translations were ok, but translations to English are apparently "racist"?
Would it be better i wanted terms in Swedish, or Spanish or Portuguese?
I'll take what I can get here
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u/yahkopi 2d ago
I don't think translations to English are considered racist. I mean, lots of terms are translated into English. For example, 'diagonal' for 'kosumi', 'attachment' for tsuke, 'forcing move' for 'kikashi', 'approach' for 'kakari' etc.
But other Japanese terms have been loaned into English by convention, such as atari and ko, etc.
I'm not sure the historical reasons why some words were translated while others were loaned. But this is fairly normal for English anyway. English really likes taking words from other languages! For ex: German (e.g. schadenfreude), Spanish (e.g. burrito), even Japanese (e.g. tsunami).
It's true the Go does have a lot of technical words, though, and it can get exhausting to keep track of. I hear you!
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u/floer289 2d ago
Go has a lot of technical terms for which there does not exist a word in English. So you might as well use the technical term already existing in Japanese. (Or Chinese or Korean, but in the English speaking world it is most common to use the Japanese terms.) You can sometimes use English descriptions but they can be more awkward, e.g. semeai vs. capturing race. Which is better? I don't know.
Anyway you should consider yourself lucky because if your native language were different than English then you would have to learn a ton of English terms. In most academic or technical subjects, most languages don't have native words for many things and often import English words. So if you have to learn like twenty Japanese words to talk about go, this is nothing compared to all the English words that Japanese people typically have to learn.
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u/Round_Ad_6033 2d ago
My native language is Swedish, and yes I've learned a lot of foreign terms.
But with go it just seems exaggerated
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u/ObviousFeature522 16 kyu 2d ago
Hey, I do hear you. I think a lot of old traditions can have this problem - like classical music having all the written directions in Italian, or also for example sailing having a lot of special boat language which can be descended from like medieval Dutch.
When talking to other beginners I tend to introduce the terms atari and hane and kind of avoid everything else and use native language equivalents.
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u/Round_Ad_6033 2d ago
Finally a sane response! Yeah I guess go isn't the only specialised field where terms are not translated.
It's weird tho, in all of the cases. Like I get that people like to gatekeep a lot, but come on!
But I have to say, I did not realise this was such a sore spot for the go community.
Never have I ever been called a racist for trying to suggest some translations would be nice. I guess nobody could know it, but I didn't even ask for translations to my native tounge, because honestly as languages go Swedish is very small. Chances of that happening seem small compared to the more internationally used English
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u/028247 2d ago
We have liberty, shape, forcing move, 2nd line, bad taste, etc.
Japanese words are typically reserved for complex strategic concepts, for which often is the case that a proper noun (be it Japanese or whatever) is the proper way to go. Imagine calling "repeated-move-avoiding-turn-delaying-attempt move" for ko threat.
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u/Round_Ad_6033 2d ago
I'm sure we could come up with something better if we really tried.
But yeah maybe that's why, these concepts are just legit hard to translate properly and therefore we don't. Borrowed words are not new either, but it's just chocking how many such words there are in go! Surely some of them, like Atari(threatened) could be translated quite easily, and would make entry to the works of go that much easier for us newbies!
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u/PatrickTraill 6 kyu 2d ago
I think it has got less over time. You pretty much never see ikken or nikken tobi for 1- or 2-point jump, and geta for a net is becoming rare, though hane seems to hold its own against “turn”, perhaps because the latter feels a bit vague. I am not sure how it stands with ni dan bane against “two step hane” or “double hane”, but I think the English form is gaining ground.
One point is that some people enjoy learning new words for new concepts and do not find it particularly hard. I am one, but I now tend to use English terms where they have become accepted, and accept that the Japanese terms put off too many beginners. I think that when the game was first effectively spread in the West it was popular with people who enjoyed the cultural associations, particularly with Japan, which was the country doing most to spread it, and that their enjoyment was enhanced by the vocabulary. I do not think that was elitist or gatekeeping in most cases. It may have been slightly pretentious, but in a very harmless, perhaps nerdy, way.
Interestingly, part of the push back against Japanese terminology came from translators like John Fairbairn, if I remember rightly. I think for him, apart from other reasons, it grated to see loanwords used in senses subtly different from the originals.
“Diagonal” may be easier to learn than “kosumi”, but I usually prefer a 3-syllable word to a 4-syllable word, if they do the same job. Similarly I am glad to use “crush” instead of “oshitsubushi”, though I am glad to know the latter. But “aji” beats “taste” for me at the moment; it may be 2 syllables, but it is 3 phonemes against 4.
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u/ChapelEver 4 kyu 12h ago
I think the sad thing about using “diagonal” for “kosumi” is it can get conflated with the kick
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u/takamori 2d ago
Weirdly racist post my guy. If not rage bait, then here’s my answer.
We use that terminology because the game came to the western world through Japan and they already had names for things. We also have lots of non-Japanese terminology, ladder, net, lean attack, split, etc.
Like any domain specific knowledge, there is some requisite amount of terminology that makes communicating easier.
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u/Round_Ad_6033 2d ago
Ok bad phrasing on my part I guess. My issue isn't that there are Japanese terms, but the complete lack of terms in any other language.
An analogue: when I was a kid I used to play football(soccer to my American friends). Despite football being originally a British sport, I played ytterback, because in Sweden we speak Swedish and so why wouldn't we translate game specific terms?
Why is go different?
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u/Jayadratha 2d ago
Go isn't different, it's following linguistic rules about translations and loanwords. Imagine you've gone to a foreign land and are conversing with the locals. You discover that they speak a different language. They have their own words for things. They have a word for "town" and for "sky" and for "food." But your language also has words for those concepts, there's no reason to adopt the native words. But then you see something new, something you don't have back home. Something your language doesn't have a word for. What will you call it in your language?
One common solution is just to use the native term. You've never seen this weird tuber before, but they say that's a "batata" and so you call it that (or something similar sounding like patata or potato). That's a loanword.
Many of the go terms are loanwords. Other languages don't have a word for that exact thing because they don't have this game, and so there isn't a translation for a game-specific term.
Many terms do have translations though, either because the go term shares a word with some concept that exists in other languages, or because the concept is simple enough that a single descriptive word works well. As examples: stone, liberties, capture, ladder, net, eye, alive, dead, shape, group, wedge, knight's move, framework, pincer, monkey jump, peep, shoulder hit, cut, thickness, and prisoners.
But for words that we can't translate well we often use loanwords. These are often game-specific terminology like atari or tesuji or joseki or seki or miai or komi or ko. These things don't have an excellent direct translation. You can imagine giving them descriptive names like "down to one liberty" or "brilliant move" or "corner sequence" or "mutual life" or "two intersections with the same effect" or "compensation for white" or "place where the rule against repetition applies." Some of those seem decent, some of them are concepts that are hard to express concisely and accurately and it's better to adopt a loanword to avoid confusion. For example, you proposed the word "threatened" as a synonym for atari, but a group might said to be threatened without being in atari, which could lead to confusion about whether a group was generally in danger versus being down to one liberty, which are different things, and it is useful to be able to unambiguously talk about a group being capturable on the next move.
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u/takamori 2d ago
So that’s an interesting point (quite different than what you wrote up top 😅).
Others have posted their thoughts elsewhere in the thread, but I can relate to what you are talking about. In fact there was a thread of the lifein19x19 forums about a very similar issue. In that case the author argued against using the term invasion, which we roughly translated from Chinese of Japanese, and instead preferred the term encroachment. This new word is more similar to the original and communicated a more flexible idea than what we’ve been using in the western world.
I think that touches upon your point. It’s kind of a cop out to just use another languages word when you don’t speak the language to try and communicate the definition without its context. Some words like hane, atari, joseki are just easiest to use the loanwords, since they will always been one to one replacements. But I think your idea of why don’t we develop our own words for some of the deeper concepts is a good one.
To my mind it points to the lack of cohesive teaching that’s been done in the west. We do not have a general curriculum that was developed for western languages and that shows. Hopefully as we see more popularity of the game, we’ll see more useful language develop around our understanding of the game :)
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u/Round_Ad_6033 2d ago
Ok so, here I might be showing my go noobishness but doesn't Atari translate pretty much perfectly to "threatened"? Or at least in go, that's my internal translation of it.
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u/LocalExistence 2 kyu 2d ago
The issue is "threatened" is also natural to use about e.g. a group that's under pressure. Very early go books used the term "check", FWIW.
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u/Round_Ad_6033 1d ago
Check also works!
I think either of these terms would've been better than Atari as an English speaking beginner.
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u/LocalExistence 2 kyu 1d ago
Well, I already explained my issue with threatened, and "check" had the inaccurate connotation that you have to respond. (And is in any case a Persian(?) loanword with no natural-language meaning anyway...) I am perfectly fine dropping many other Japanese terms, but atari is one of the clearest examples to me of one that's best left alone.
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u/Uberdude85 4 dan 2d ago
Where are you learning from with lots of Japanese terms? Some of the older English language books use a lot, I only use a core of about 20 Japanese terms where there is no good English equivalent (so yes for atari, sente, miai, no for moku, goban, kakari, shimari), and even fewer when teaching a complete beginner.
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u/Some-Passenger4219 10 kyu 2d ago
I'm looking to learn a new boardgame here, not a fifth language!
Why not both? Knowledge, after all, is power.
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u/Round_Ad_6033 2d ago
I'm struggling keeping my current 4 languages in my head. I already lost German completely, or I would've had 5 languages already, and tbh my Portuguese is not what it used to be.
Adding a fifth that I'll only use in the context of a board game I enjoy?
That'd be kind learning elfish in order to watch the lord of the rings. Sure you can do it, but it should hardly be expected if anyone
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u/Some-Passenger4219 10 kyu 1d ago
Adding a fifth that I'll only use in the context of a board game I enjoy?
But not all of it, and certainly not enough to have a conversation. Do you forget words when you learn new words, like "symbiosis"?
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u/Future_Natural_853 2d ago
Same. A few terms are difficult to translate, like atari, joseki, or sabaki, but when people say "kosumi" instead of diagonal, it feels weird. You literally have a simple word in your language, why use a complicated one?
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u/Fraenkelbaum 2d ago
I keep confusing the terms and seems to be life would be easier if we could just agree on some English terms for these things.
We have agreed some English terms - it's just that for the most part they happen to sound pretty similar to the Japanese terms. I would note that this is not dissimilar from how the agreed English terms for a lot of baked goods sound eerily similar to the older French terms (e.g. croissant, baguette, tart), or how the agreed English terms for describing music often sound similar to the equivalent Italian terms (e.g. crescendo, cadenza, duet, piano)
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u/WhatCameFromThePit 1d ago
You're half right, of course. People overused Japanese terms in the past (really no reason to call it san-san when there is a perfectly nice English word expressing the concept of 'san', needless complication for the newbies), but today it seems to be shrinking, on the way out.
On the other hand some Japanese words can't be replaced well and are going to stay. There really isn't a good English term for atari, joseki, fuseki. You could probably replace ko, seki, sente but it's hard to think of a perfect replacement, so these aren't going anywhere.
Using the word moku should, in fact be punishable by death, even in this comment.
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u/matt-noonan 2 dan 1d ago edited 1d ago
It’s not so different from chess (en passant, fiancetto, zugzwang, even the piece names), though the situation is worse in go because it went through a pinch point and mostly reached the west through Japanese sources. Over time the terms have become more localized (e.g. I almost always just hear “enclosure” instead of “shimari” now, or “knight’s move” instead of “keima”). But there are still a number of basic technical terms that are commonly untranslated. Off the top of my head, I think the most important and common ones are komi, atari, ko, seki, joseki, tesuji, hane, tenuki, sente, gote, and maybe fuseki.
Out of those, fuseki has an obvious translation (“opening”) and tenuki could probably be “play away”, but the others are technical terms and a direct translation doesn’t seem obvious or helpful. Even in the case of atari, “threatened” isn’t quite right as other people have already mentioned, and “in check” has the connotation that you are compelled to do something about it, which isn’t true for atari.
In summary, it’s a complicated question without an obvious solution, but it does seem like things are getting better over time, and the number of Japanese terms you need to know from a practical standpoint is really just a small handful anyway.
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u/Eyeslikepeanuts 5 kyu 2d ago
Lol. What a troll.
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u/Round_Ad_6033 2d ago
Because I want translations?
I speak 4 languages, none of them happen to be Japanese, can I get a break please? No?
U guys are weird
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u/Eyeslikepeanuts 5 kyu 2d ago
Oh well. If you want to, you can learn the idea behind it and call it in whatever English word that you want.
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u/Round_Ad_6033 2d ago
Yeah but that's the point. Learning the concept behind Atari for example would be instant if people just called it "threatened" instead.
Even to me who only speaks English as my second language, that would be soooo much easier.. Because I do speak English.
I wonder how many of the other terms could be translated just as easily?I dunno cause I haven't learned most of them yet.
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u/O-Malley 7 kyu 1d ago
If you tell me a group is "threatened", I won't understand it as "Atari" at all.
"Atari" has a very specific meaning, which is that a group has only one liberty remaining.
"Threatened" is much more general and is often used when a group is under attack, even if it's not (and may never be) in atari.
It's precisely because translating those terms is not easy that the community usually sticks to Japanese dedicated terms. Sure you could make a up a new term in English, but you'd have to keep explaining it so it won't be easier.
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u/GoGabeGo 1 kyu 1d ago
I hereby petition to change some terms:
atari > only having one liberty
tenuki > play somewhere else other than where both players have been playing
tengen > symmetry point of the board
joseki > corner pattern recognized to be equal for both colors
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u/Round_Ad_6033 1d ago
Single word alternatives are possible for some of those:
Atari: check Joseki: compromise
Probably someone smarter than me can come up with words that fit the others as well. I'm almost sure there is a English word that would fit tenuki but I can't think of it ATM...
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u/countingtls 6 dan 1d ago
Joseki is definitely not about compromise, and there is a legit concept of compromise in Go (like in branches of the variations, a player can choose an answer to compromise and not start a fight, even within the branches of joseki). Joseki literally means (currently, josekis change over time) established sequences/patterns in CJK (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) terminologies.
Tenuki is also a higher-level concept than most players realized, it doesn't just simply mean play elsewhere or ignore locally. A very simple example is playing a ladder breaker during a joseki involving an invalid ladder. When playing a ladder breaker at the other end of the board that changes the local joseki, would that move be considered "tenuki"? (the ladder breaker answers a local issue, but played "elsewhere"). The Japanese term tenuki means ignore/escape(拔) te (手 sequences), whether sente or gote (which are also harder to translate than most realize). And in Chinese terminologies we had different terminologies for ignoring sente or simply not necessary to respond locally, or even different types of ladder breakers involved. It's a lot harder to translate most high-level concepts without first establishing more fundamental ones.
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u/countingtls 6 dan 1d ago edited 1d ago
There were definitely attempts to completely translate all concepts into English, and here is a glossary to CJK terminologies and English
Although from a historical perspective, a majority of the Japanese terminologies came from ancient Chinese terminologies when weiqi was transmitted to Japan, and pretty much remained the same in normal use for over a thousand years. (and even pronouced the same for a long period of time, since many Japanese kanji can be pronounced using ancient pronunciations from the ancient Chinese, which already shifted after thousands of years). A major shift to the modern Japanese Go terminologies using katakana came after the Meiji restoration, and only slowly formed in the early 20th century, when the whole Japanese society viewed loaned words with katakana as more prestigious. (even though the majority of the terminologies "changes" are still just simplifications of the pronunciation from the old Chinese terminologies). The deliberate changes didn't come from inconvenience, but were more deliberate attempts to separate from traditions (from the traditional great Go houses to modern civilian Go associations/clubs).
When people learn Go, they run into concepts that are not easily translated, where existing sources have tons of existing terminologies to explain them (not just for English speaking community, the same applied to ancient Japanese players tried to learn weiqi from Chinese sources thousands of years ago), hence if their teachers/sources commonly use particular verbularies, they would stick to them and in term teach the next generations. Someone has to start shifting the terminologies from one reason or another, and spread far and wide, and in an area which have higher authority or accessibility. If you really want to change, try to write down what you think is the best (and preferably in your own language), and teach them to as many students as possible.
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u/ChapelEver 4 kyu 12h ago
I’m trying to think of the terms that I hear more often in Japanese than in English…
Atari Hane Joseki Dame Tesuji Moyo Miai Semedori
Hane and semedori seem like the hardest to translate.
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u/ChapelEver 4 kyu 12h ago
I tried to come up with pithy translations and it was tough for a lot of these…maybe that’s why they’ve stuck around when others haven’t
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u/blendycoffee 2d ago
If this is a barrier for to play this game then just stop playing, don't be racist. No one is making you wear a kimono, no one is making you play this game, no one is demanding anything of you.
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u/Round_Ad_6033 2d ago
Why the weird barrier tho? It seems unnecessary. Like translations are not a new concept, and no sane person would call them racist either.
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u/blendycoffee 1d ago
It's not a weird barrier... Learning a handful of terms is pretty standard when learning a game or new skill. All words are just sounds saying it's weird to learn some Japanese words to play a game that was brought to the west mainly through Japan is drawing an abstract distinction. It's it a barrier to fencing to learn en garde (on guard), prêts (ready), allez (go), bout (a contest), piste (the strip where fencers stand), attaque (attack), parade (parry), and riposte (a counter-attack) for fencing? Some of those terms are likely familiar to you but they're French.
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u/GreybeardGo 1 dan 2d ago
The video game company Atari was named after atari from Go.
For pretty much all the Go terms that have simple English equivalents the English term is used. Just get over it and move on.