The general principle here is that engaging with your hobbies and interests in the second language is a good way to increase exposure (and also more fun).

For me, it was translating lyrics and interviews of Japanese musicians.

I have a similar story.

Growing up in a place that's mostly not English speaking, I owe a large part of my English vocabulary to Magic the Gathering. Many of the cards use somewhat obscure words to impart a fantasy theme, and I learned them naturally when playing.

Cool game.

I kind of tried to return to it after like a 2 decade hiatus, but the game these days doesn't feel like the one I played back then.

Monkey Island taught me English. I can't tell you how confusing insult sword fighting was initially. I had to create long tables with the correct answers because I didn't get most of the puns, and then I had to start from scratch when I had to fight Carla.

Anyway, thanks, Ron Gilbert.

Nice. Back when I lived in Taiwan, several of my students regularly played Magic: The Gathering (魔法風雲會). I’d been playing since 4th edition so I was already very familiar with it. Combined with the fact that I was studying traditional Chinese at the time, it turned out to be quite helpful.

Incidental language exposure through gaming is an awesome way to learn.

Wanting to play Leisure suit Larry and space text adventure games properly was when I finally “cracked” English, after that I become rapidly fluent. However I feel like it didn’t do my sense of humour any favours.

Cute premise but reads like a LinkedIn post (or maybe just AI).

Contraversial 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.

> "...and “Damage” (ダメージ, dameeji) until..."

I only have a basic knowledge of Japanese, more from a linguistics standpoint than a language learning standpoint, but it's interesting to me that "dameeji" is written with katakana and sounds like a loanword, instead of sounding more distinct from the English, which I'd expect from a word that has existed for a long time in Japan. Is this because it's more like a game-specific technical word, rather than just the word "damage"? Or am I just very uninformed about Japanese?

There's a serious advantage to becoming fluent by moving to a country that speaks that language fluently. Try becoming fluent in Japanese in Nigeria for "Japanese hard mode"

This is a really cool idea, I am living in a non English speaking country but work all day online with English speaking colleagues so I need something like this. I really like the idea of getting cards only in the local language. That may be a bit expensive for constructed but it could work really well for drafts. When drafting a new set I used to spend hours learning all the new cards beforehand so it's not really different.

Can't imagine using MTG to learn a language. But it does seem intuitive in hindsight. Back when I played in the junior super series and nationals I could recall almost every card and what it did. So I can see how that leap would be tantermount. Kudos.

This account could be an interesting case study for the comprehensible input hypothesis of language acquisition. Narrowing the language domain and pre-studying vocabulary may have helped the effectiveness of the study: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Input_hypothesis

I have always felt lucky to have learned C and Magic: The Gathering at the same time (1994). I am not sure if the C helped my MTG playing more or vice versa.

That's really neat! It's interesting the ways play interacts with how we learn about the world. Sometimes the best learning is the most fun!

It's no secret that being social will help you become in fluent in any language you are studying.

Too many people just want to learn online/without social contact, and never get beyond an intermediate level.

Side effect: All your cards look cool.

I find it more likely that the author got more fluent from his job, friends, and other every day things you run into by living in Japan. Spending every day reading, writing, talking to, and listening to one's coworkers and then after work also talking more with those coworkers or friends would be much more time than a single magic event per week.

Now new zero-evidence zero-consulation rules are going to take me from Japanese fluency to N2.